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This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below.

A TREASURY
OF SCIENCE

Edited by

HARLOW SHAPLEY
SAMUEL RAPPORT and HELEN WRIGHT

With an Introduction by Dr. Shapley

Enlarged Edition

with a complete, new section
on atomic fission

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

A Treasury of Science

ALL RIGHTS IN THIS BOOK ARB RESERVED. NO PART OF THE BOOK
MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF BRIEF QUOTATIONS
EMBODIED IN CRITICAL ARTICLES AND REVIEWS. FOR INFORMATION
ADDRESS HARPER & BROTHERS

D-Y

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xi

Part One: INTRODUCTION
ON SHARING IN THE CONQUESTS OF SCIENCE by Harlow Shapley 3

Part Two: SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD n

by Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Patricf^ Geddes

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS by T. H. Huxley 14

SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN by Oliver La Forge 21

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ by Dallas Lore Sharp 31

THE AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE 42

by Roger Bacon, Albert Einstein, Sir Arthur Eddington,
Ivan Pavlov, and Raymond B. Fosdicf^

Part Three: THE PHYSICAL WORLD
A. THE HEAVENS

A THEORY THAT THE EARTH MOVES AROUND THE SUN 54

by Nicholas Copernicus

PROOF THAT THE EARTH MOVES by Galileo Galilei 58

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE by Forest Ray Moulton . 62

Is THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? by Sir James Jeans 83

THE MILKY WAY AND BEYOND by Sir Arthur Eddington 89

B. THE EARTH

A YOUNG MAN LOOKING AT ROCKS by Hugh Miller 97

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE by Sir Archibald Geikf 103

EARTHQUAKES — WHAT ARE THEY? 114

by The Reverend James B. Macelwane, S.J.

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE by Fairfax Downey 118

MAN, MAKER OF WILDERNESS by Paul B. Sears 126

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER by Wolfgang Langeweische 132

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

C. MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

NEWTONIANA 147

DISCOVERIES by Sir Isaac Newton 150
MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION by Lancelot Hogben 154

EXPERIMENTS AND IDEAS by Benjamin Franklin 168

1 EXPLORING THE ATOM by Sir James Jeans 175

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD by Henry Schacht 200

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM by Eve Curie 209

THE TAMING OF ENERGY by George Russell Harrison 218

SPACE, TIME AND EINSTEIN by Paul R. Hey I 228

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY by Robert E. Rose 235

THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION by Waldemar Kaempffert 248

JETS POWER FUTURE FLYING by Watson Davis 253

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER by George Russell Harrison 257

Part Four: THE WORLD OF LIFE
A. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

THE NATURE OF LIFE by W. J. V. Osterhout 273

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 280

by Sir /. Arthur Thomson and Patric\ Geddes

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS by Paul de Kruij 297

WHERE LIFE BEGINS by George W. Gray 307

B. THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

•

ON BEING THE RIGHT SIZE by /. B. S. Haldane 321

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 326

by David Starr Jordan and Vernon Lyman Kellogg
FLOWERING EARTH by Donald Culross Peattie 337

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY by T. H. Huxley 378

THE LIFE OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS

by David Starr Jordan and Vernon Lyman Kellogg 387

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN by William Beebe 395

THE WARRIOR ANTS by Caryl P. Hastens 406

THE VAMPIRE BAT 415

by Raymond L. Ditmars and Arthur M. Greenhall
ANCESTORS by Gustav Eckstein 426

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
C. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

DARWINISMS 435

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" by Sir Arthur Keith 437

GREGOR MENDEL AND His WORK by Hugo lltis 446

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS by Julian Huxley 453

MAGIC ACRES by Alfred Toombs 464

Part Five: THE WORLD OF MAN

A. FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

THE EVIDENCE OF THE DESCENT OF MAN FROM SOME LOWER FORM 475

by Charles Darwin

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM by Earnest A. Hooton 481

MISSING LINKS by John R. Baker 491

THE POPOL VUH 497

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE by Vilhjalmur Stefansson 502

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY by Sir Arthur Keith 512

B. THE HUMAN MACHINE

You AND HEREDITY by Amram Scheinfeld 521

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN by Margaret Shea Gilbert 540

How THE HUMAN BODY Is STUDIED by Sir Arthur Keith 551

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN by Julian Huxley 557

C. THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH 568

HIPPOCRATES THE GREEK — THE END OF MAGIC by Logan Clendening 569

AN INQUIRY INTO THE CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF THE VARIOLAE VACCINAE 577

by Edward Jenner

THE HISTORY OF THE KINE Pox by Benjamin Water house 582

Louis PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES by Rent Vallery-Radot 586

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES by Victor Heiser 604

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY by George W. Gray 623

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

D. MAN'S MIND

THINKING by James Harvey Robinson 638

IMAGINATION CREATRIX by John Livingston Lowes 650,

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD by A. A. Brill 655

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES by George W. Gray 673

Part Six: ATOMIC FISSION

WAR DEPARTMENT RELEASE ON NEW MEXICO TEST, JULY 16, 1945 689

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES by Henry D. Smyth 695

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY by E. O. Lawrence - 727

ALMIGHTY ATOM by John J. O'Neill 741
THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE ATOMIC BOMB FOR INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS by Jacob Viner 751

ATOMIC WEAPONS by J. R. Oppenheimer 760

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 769

Preface

READER OF THIS BOOK MAY BE INTERESTED IN

the methods used in preparing it. We envisaged the audience as the
person without specialized knowledge; we accepted as our purpose to give
some realization of how the scientist works, of the body of knowledge
that has resulted and of the excitement of the scientist's search. One of
us has endeavored to convey some of that excitement in his Introduction,
On Sharing in the Conquests of Science.

We realized that a group of random selections, however good in them-
selves, would suggest little of the unity, the architectural quality of science.
We spent some months therefore in organizing the material before we
adopted a definite plan. The plan is evident from the titles of the major
Parts: Science and the Scientist, The Physical World, The World of Life
and The World of Man. The subdivisions carry through the plan in what
seems a logical sequence.

There followed a period of over a year during which several thousand
books and articles were examined in the light of this general scheme.
In making our selections we have tried to emphasize especially the status
and the contributions of modern science, to the end that the reader can
bring himself abreast of current progress. But in a few cases, we have
gone back the better part of a century to find the right discussion. We
have incorporated a number of biographical sketches of important scien-
tists, among them Pasteur, Madame Curie, Leeuwenhoek, in order to give
a glimpse of the personalities of scientific explorers. Also we have reached
generously into the past and selected classics of science, which not only
add flavor but also exhibit the work and workers who have done so much
to guide and inspire our civilization.

It has been found possible to avoid translations almost completely, since
the whole range of modern science has been explored assiduously by
English-writing people. Much assistance in the preparation of a volume
of this sort comes from the American standard magazines, and the semi-
popular scientific monthlies. They have provided for scientific writers an
incentive to summarize their work or the special field concerning which

x PREFACE

they write, in a fashion that is comprehensive, and comprehensible to the
layman.

We are also especially indebted to certain skillful scientific interpreters,
among them the English school of writers which includes the Huxleys,
Sir J. A. Thomson, Sir James Jeans, and J. B. S. Haldane. More than
once we have turned to their writings in preference to the scattered,
technical, fragmentary originals from which their synthetic pictures are
compounded.

Many important scientists are of course not represented in this collec-
tion, either because their writings have not been on the appropriate level,
or because in our judgment the reader can do better with another writer.
Limitations of space have also shortened and compressed many of the
selections. And since the volume is designed for the general reader and
not for the specialist, except when he is also a general reader, the addition
of references, technical footnotes and the similar apparatus of the serious
student are omitted.

We hope that the volume will justify itself in interest, and in instruc-
tional value, whether it is opened at random, or is methodically read from
beginning to end. For the reader who wishes to understand the full mean-
ing of any selection in relation to its context, we suggest a perusal of the
brief introductory notes at the beginnings of the main Parts.

As a general reference book this volume should have definite value.
For example, the attentive reading of Moulton, Jeans, and Eddington will
provide an authoritative picture of the fundamentals as well as the recent
advances of astronomy; and in short space the reader can obtain from
Langewiesche a fair understanding of modern weather prediction. Several
contributors make atomic structure or the past of man a well-rounded
story. And in a single essay subjects such as the Metagalaxy, earthquakes,
parasitism or Freudianism are each clearly summarized.

Nevertheless, the reader should realize that this work does not aim to
be encyclopedic in presentation. It is our hope that he will go further into
the vast stores of available writings to get specialized knowledge of any
branch of science that may interest him.

A contribution toward the integration of science is, as we have said,
one goal of this volume. We hope that it may be of particular value to
the scientific worker himself. No one works effectively in more than
one or two of the special fields. The average specialist is just as unin-
formed about science remote from his specialty as is the general reader.
A familiarity with other disciplines should not only be good entertain-
ment, but instructive as to techniques and attitudes. But of most impor-
tance, the scientific specialist, while reading abroad, is informing himself

PREFACE xi

on the inter-fields of science, or at least on the possibility and merit o£
inter-field study. If this volume can assist in however small a way in the
integration that seems essential to man's intelligent control of his own
fabrications, it will have attained the desired end.

Preface to the New Edition

NECESSITY OF A SECTION ON THE SCIENCE

-**• and world-disturbing consequences of the fission of uranium atoms, in
this second edition of our Treasury, can be attributed in considerable
part to several episodes, in modern scientific groping, that beautifully
illustrate the interlacing of the various sciences. We now commonly under-
stand that techniques devised by one science may carry over to another;
that results obtained in the biological realm may provide a key to mysteries
that shroud the inanimate.

But were we prepared to find that the study of paleozoic plant fossil
would combine with the theory of relativity to culminate in bombs that
frighten our civilization? Half a dozen fields of science have joined to
inaugurate the new age of atoms, rockets, radar and antibiotics. The
specialties contribute to astonishing generalizations and to surprising
end results. Perhaps our bringing of the varied classics of science into
this one large volume is justified on the grounds that science, thought
and life can be viewed as one integrated phenomenon.

Before the somewhat alarming release of atomic energy was accom-
plished by the nuclear physicists, there were underlying basic contribu-
tions by astronomers, paleontologists, chemists, botanists, geologists and
mathematicians. Some of the critical steps can be briefly cited: the
discovery and interpretation of radioactivity fifty years ago; the use of
the natural radioactivity of uranium and thorium to estimate the ages
of geological strata; the deduction that the life of half a billion years
ago required much the same quantity and quality of sunlight as we now
receive; the conclusion by astronomers that no other source than that
inside the atom could provide the required amount and duration of
solar energy; the growing realization that the energy in the atomic
nucleus, as liberated in the hot interiors of stars in accordance with the
principles of relativity, was the major power source of the universe; and,
finally, the application to uranium 235 of atom-cracking and power-re-
leasing radiation, with epochal consequences.

It has been a glorious build-up, involving the stars of galactic space and
the atoms of the microcosmos, and ending in the urgent need that the

xii PREFACE

social scientists and the practical citizens help to solve current problems,
both those of saving ourselves from the danger of our own ingenuity,
and those of capitalizing for the good of humanity the gains that are
now possible through the advances of science.

The two principal changes in the present edition are the considerable
extension of the selection from Jeans "Exploring the Atom" and the
supplement of several contributions relating to atomic energy. The reader
should not be misled by the emphasis on uranium and plutonium into
giving atomic energy exclusive credit for the atomic age. There are
many other contributors to the scientific revolution. Those popularly
known best are jet propulsion, radar, penicillin and sulfa drugs, rocketry,
blood derivatives and numerous developments in electronic magic.

But back of these modern evidences of human skill are the conquests
of generations of scientific workers who could think giant thoughts
and fabricate ingenious tools and theories without the rich accessories
now at hand. They laid the foundations on which we build foundations
for future builders. We hope that the Treasury of Science which recounts
many of these adventures of the past and present, will continue to
provide the reader with building material for his own constructions.

HARLOW SHAPLEY

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

On Sharing in the Conquests of Science

HARLOW SHAPLEY

JT'S A WONDER I CAN STAND IT! TRAMPING FOR HOURS
JL through the damp woods back of Walden Pond with Henry Thoreau,
checking up on the food preferences of the marsh hawk, and the spread
of sumach and goldenrod in old abandoned clearings. It requires stamina
to match his stride as he plunges through swamps and philosophy,
through underbrush, poetry, and natural history; it takes agility of body
and mind if one does a full share of the day's measuring and speculation.

But no sooner have I left the Walden Woods than I am scrambling
up the fossil-rich Scottish cliffs with Hugh Miller, preparing the ground-
work of the immortal history of The Old Red Sandstone. With the
wonderment of pioneers we gaze at the petrified ripple-marks that
some shallow receding sea, in ancient times, has left as its fluted me-
morial— its monument built on the sand and of the sand, but nevertheless
enduring. We break open a stony ball — this Scottish stonemason and
I — a nodular mass of blue limestone, and expose beautiful traces o£
an extinct world of animals and plants; we find fossilized tree ferns,
giant growths from the Carboniferous Period of two hundred and fifty
million years ago — and forthwith we lose ourselves in conjecture.

And thea I am off on another high adventure, higher than the moon
this time; I am entering the study of the Frauenburg Cathedral to
help Nicholas Copernicus do calculations on the hypothetical motions
of the planets. He is, of course, deeply bemused with that rather queer
notion that it might be the Sun that stands still — not the Earth. Perhaps
he can demonstrate that the planets go around the Sun, each in its own
course. Fascinated, I peer over his shoulder at the archaic geometry,
watch his laborious penning of the great book, and listen to his
troubled murmuring about the inaccuracies of the measured coordinates
of Saturn. "There are, you know, two other big ones further out," I put
in; "and a system of m#ny moons around Jupiter, which makes it all
very clear and obvious." It must startle him no end to have me interrupt

4 INTRODUCTION

in such a confident way. But he does nothing about it. More planets? An
incredible idea! Difficulties enough in trying to explain the visible,
without complicating the complexities further by introducing invisible
planets. My assistance ignored, I experience, nevertheless, a carefree
exhilaration; for I have, as it were, matched my wits with the wisdom of
the greatest of revolutionaries, and come off not too badly!

Now that I am fully launched in this career of working with the
great explorers, and of cooperating in their attacks on the mysteries of
the universe, I undertake further heroic assignments. I labor in the
laboratories of the world; I maintain fatiguing vigils in the mountains
and on the sea, try dangerous experiments, and make strenuous expedi-
tions to Arctic shores and to torrid jungles — all without moving from
the deep fireside chair.

Benjamin Franklin has a tempting idea, and I am right there to lend
him a hand. We are having a lot of trouble in keeping that cantankerous
kite in the thunder-cloud, from which the electric fluid should flow to
charge and animate the house key. "Before long, Sir, we shall run
printing presses with this fluid, and light our houses, and talk around
the world"— but he does not put it in the Autobiography. I am clearly
a century ahead of my time!

Youthful Charles Darwin is in the Galapagos. The good brig Beagle
stands offshore. He has with him the collecting kit, the notebooks, and his
curiosity. He is making records of the slight variations among closely
similar species of plants and animals. He is pondering the origin of these
differences, and the origin of species, and the whole confounding business
of the origin of plants and animals. I sit facing him, on the rocks beside
the tide pool, admiring the penetration and grasp of this young dreamer.
The goal of his prolonged researches is a revolution in man's conception
of life; he is assembling the facts and thoughts, and in this work I am a
participant! Nothing could be more exciting. Also I have an advantage.
I know about Mendel and Mendelian laws, and genes and chromosomes.
I know that X-rays (unknown to Darwin), and other agents, can
produce mutations and suddenly create living forms that Nature has
not attained. This posterior knowledge of mine enhances the pleasure of
my collaboration with the great naturalist; and I need have no fear that
my information, or my ethereal presence, might bother him.

There is so much scientific work of this sort for me to do before some
tormenting duty draws me out of my strategic chair. The possibilities
are nearly endless. Like a benign gremlin, I sit on the brim of a test
tube in Marie Curie's laboratory and excitedly speculate with her on
that radioactive ingredient in the pitchblende; I help name it radium.

ON SHARING IN THE CONQUESTS OF SCIENCE 5

With Stefansson and the Eskimos I live for months on a scanty menu,
and worry with him about the evils of civilization. And when young
Evariste Galois, during his beautiful, brief, perturbed life in Paris, sits
down to devise sensationally new ideas and techniques in pure mathe-
matics, I am right there with applause and sympathy.

Whenever I pause to appreciate how simple it is for me to take an
active part in unravelling the home life of primitive man, or observing
the voracity of a vampire bat; how simple for me, in company with the
highest authorities, to reason on the theory of relativity or explore with
a cyclotron the insides of atoms, it is then that I call for additional
blessings on those artisans who invented printing. They have provided
me with guide lines to remote wonders — highly conductive threads that
lead me, with a velocity faster than that of light itself, into times long past
and into minds that biologically are long extinct. Through the simple
process of learning how to interpret symbols, such as those that make
this sentence, I can take part in most of the great triumphs of the human
intellect. Blessings and praises, laurel wreaths and myrtle, are due those
noble spirits who made writing and reading easily accessible, and thus
opened to us all the romance of scientific discovery.

Have you ever heard an ox warble? Probably not. Perhaps it goes
through its strange life-cycle silent to our gross ears. But I have seen ox
warbles, and through the medium of the printed page I have followed
their gory careers. The ox warbles to which I refer are, of course, not
bovine melodies, but certain flies that contribute to the discomfort of
cattle, to the impoverishment of man's property, and to the enrichment
of his knowledge of the insect world.1

It required a declaration of war on this entomological enemy, by
some of the great nations of the planet, in order to discover him com-
pletely and entrench mankind against his depredations. It took a century
of detective work on the part of entomologists to lay bare the ox warble's
secret life. Now that I have the story before me, I can go along with the
scientists and experience again their campaigns, their misadventures, and
their compensating discoveries. I can see how to connect a number
of separate phenomena that long were puzzling — those gay pasture flies
that look like little bumblebees; those rows of tiny white eggs on the
hairs above the hoofs of cattle; the growing larvae, guided mysteriously
by ancestral experience to wind their way for months through the flesh
of the legs and bodies of their unknowing hosts; the apparently inactive

1The full story of the ox warble is buried in various technical government reports. But
see a brief chapter on the subject in Insects — Man's Chief Competitors, by W. P. Flint and
C. L. Metcalf (Williams & Wilkins, 1932).

6 INTRODUCTION

worms in the cattle's throats; the large midwinter mounds, scattered
subcutaneously along the spines of the herd; and eventually those ruin-
ous holes in the leather, which have forced governments into aggressive
action — into defense-with-pursuit tactics for the protection of their eco-
nomic frontiers. It is all clear now. During the millennia of recent geolog-
ical periods a little fly has learned how to fatten its offspring on a fresh
beef diet, and prepare its huge grub for that critical moment when it
crawls out, through the hole it has made in the ox hide, and drops to
the earth for its metamorphosis — the change from a headless, legless,
eyeless, dark childhood to a maturity of wings and sunlight.

The curiosity the scientist strives to satisfy is thus sometimes im-
pelled by economics; more often by the pure desire to know. Our
black-on-white guiding threads, which you may call printed books, or
recorded history, not only transmit the stories of ancient and modern
inquisitiveness and the inquiries it has inspired, but they also report, to
the discerning recipient, the inevitability of practiced internationalism.
They transmit the message that all races of mankind are curious about
the universe, and that, when free and not too depressed by hunger, men
instinctively question and explore, analyze and catalogue. They have done
it in all ages, in all civilized countries. They work singly, in groups,
and increasingly in world-wide organizations. Science recognizes no
impossible national boundaries, and only temporary barriers of language.
It points the way to international cooperation.

To more than the art of printing, however, do we owe the successes
and pleasures of our vicarious adventures in science. We are also greatly
indebted to those who can write and will write in terms of our
limited comprehension. Not all the scientists have the facility. Some-
times the talk is too tough for us, or too curt. They have not the time
to be lucid on our level and within our vocabulary, or perhaps their
mental intensity has stunted the faculty of sympathetic explanation.
When such technical barriers shut us from the scientific workshop, it is
then we like to consult with a clear-spoken and understanding inter-
preter. We sit on the back porch of the laboratory, while he, as middle-
man, goes inside to the obscurities and mysteries, to return occasionally
with comprehensible reports. In listening to him we hear not only his
voice, but the overtones o£ the master he interprets. I like these men of
understanding who play Boswell to the specialist. They often have a
gift greater than that of the concentrated workers whom they soften
up for us. For they have breadth and perspective, which help us to
get at the essence of a problem more objectively than we could even if
we were fully equipped with the language and knowledge of the fact-

ON SHARING IN THE CONQUESTS OF SCIENCE 7

bent explorer and analyst. The scientific interpreters frequently enhance
our enjoyment in that they give us of themselves, as well as of the dis-
coverers whose exploits they recount. We are always grateful to them,
moreover, for having spared us labor and possibly discouragement.

Perhaps the greatest satisfaction in reading of scientific exploits and
participating, with active imagination, in the dull chores, the brave syn-
theses, the hard-won triumphs of scientific work, lies in the realization
that ours is not an unrepeatable experience. Tomorrow night we can
again go out among the distant stars. Again we can drop cautiously
below the ocean surface to observe the unbelievable forms that inhabit
those salty regions of high pressure and dim illumination. Again we can
assemble the myriad molecules into new combinations, weave them
into magic carpets that take us into strange lands of beneficent drugs
and of new fabrics and utensils destined to enrich the process of
everyday living. Again we can be biologist, geographer, astronomer,
engineer, or help the philosopher evaluate the nature and meaning of
natural laws.

We can return another day to these shores, and once more embark
for travels over ancient or modern seas in quest of half-known lands —
go forth as dauntless conquistadores, outfitted with the maps and gear
provided through the work of centuries of scientific adventures.

But we have done enough for this day. We have much to dream about.
Our appetites may have betrayed our ability to assimilate. The fare has
been irresistibly palatable. It is time to disconnect the magic threads;
time to wind up the spiral galaxies, roll up the Milky Way and lay it
aside until tomorrow.

1943

PART TWO

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

Synopsis

MANY STORIES OF JOURNEYS TO UNKNOWN LANDS HAVE
been written. Many tales of wonder have been told by the great writers
of the world. Yet it is common knowledge that the reality of modern science
is more wonderful than the imaginative world of a Poe, a Wells or a
Jules Verne. It is therefore unfortunate that the story has usually been told in
long words, written down in forbidding tomes. Like Agassiz's monumental
work on turtles, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,
described by Dallas Lore Sharp in the following pages, they are "massive,
heavy, weathered as if dug from the rocks/' Yet there is amusement in
science, excitement, profound satisfaction. It is fitting that our first selection
should be an attempt to describe that feeling, The Wonder of the World
by Sir /. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes.

Nor is science something esoteric, something mysterious and incompre-
hensible to the average person. We are all scientists, as T. H. Huxley shows
clearly, whether we are concerned with the properties of green apples or
with finding the burglar who stole our spoons. And we are led to our con-
clusions by "the same train of reasoning which a man of science pursues
when he is endeavoring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult
phenomena." One of the great scientists of the nineteenth century, as well
as its greatest scientific writer, Huxley is well qualified to instruct us.

The quality that sets the scientist apart is perhaps the persistence of his
curiosity about the world. That is what causes him to bury himself in his
laboratory or travel to a remote corner of the globe. Like Oliver La Farge,
in Scientists Are Lonely Men, he may spend months or even years on some
quest, seeming trivial yet destined perhaps to prove a clue to the origin of a
race. Or like Mr. Jenks of Middleboro, in Turtle Eggs for Agassiz, he may
spend countless hours beside a murky pond, waiting for a turtle to lay her

10 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

eggs. In both these tales there is much of the excitement, the emotional and
intellectual spirit of the scientific quest.

It is not possible in brief space to describe all the aspects of that quest.
But in The Aims and Methods of Science, a group of thinkers illuminate a
few of its many complexities. A passage from Roger Bacon shows why he is
considered one of the originators of scientific method. Albert Einstein asks
and answers the question, "Why does this magnificent applied science,
which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness?" Sir
Arthur Eddington shows that again and again the scientist must fly like
Icarus, before he finally reaches the sun. The passion of work and research is
Ivan Pavlov's theme. In a final selection, especially pertinent today as men
fight, Raymond B. Fosdick explains how the scientist cannot be bound by the
borders of sea or land, how no war can completely destroy his international
brotherhood.

The Wonder of the World

SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON AND PATRICK GEDDES

From Life: Outlines of General Biology

ARISTOTLE, WHO WAS NOT UNACCUSTOMED TO
•4^. resolute thinking, tells us that throughout nature there is always
something of the wonderful — thaumaston. What precisely is this "won-
derful"? It cannot be merely the startling, as when we announce the fact
that if we could place in one long row all the hair-like vessels or capillaries
of the human body, which connect the ends of the arteries with the
beginnings of the veins, they would reach across the Atlantic. It would
be all the same to us if they reached only half-way across. Nor can the
wonderful be merely the puzzling, as when we are baffled by the "sailing"
of an albatross round and round our ship without any perceptible strokes
of its wings. For some of these minor riddles are being read every year,
without lessening, however, the fundamental wonderfulness of Nature.
Indeed, the much-abused word "wonderful" is properly applied to any fact
the knowledge of which greatly increases our appreciation of the signifi-
cance of the system of which we form a part. The truly wonderful maizes
all other things deeper and higher. Science is always dispelling mists —
the minor marvels; but it leaves us with intellectual blue sky, sublime
mountains, and deep sea. Their wonder appears — and remains.

There seems to be a rational basis for wonder in the abundance of power
in the world — the power that keeps our spinning earth together as it re-
volves round the sun, that keeps our solar system together as it journeys
through space at the rate of twelve miles a second towards a point in the
sky, close to the bright star Vega, called "the apex of the sun's way." At
the other extreme there is the power of a fierce little world within the com-
plex atom, whose imprisoned energies are set free to keep up the radiant
energies of sun and star. And between these extremes of the infinitely
great and the infinitely little are the powers of life — the power of winding
-up the clock almost as fast as it runs down, the power of a fish that has

12 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

better engines than those of a Mauretania, life's power of multiplying
itself, so that in a few hours an invisible microbe may become a fatal mil-
lion.

Another, also old-fashioned, basis for wonder is to be found in the im-
mensities. It takes light eight minutes to reach us from the sun, though it
travels at the maximum velocity — of about 186,300 miles per second. So
we see the nearest star by the light that left it four years ago, and Vega as
it was twenty-seven years ago, and most of the stars that we see without a
telescope as they were when Galileo Galilei studied them in the early years
of the seventeenth century. In any case it is plain that we are citizens of
no mean city.

A third basis for rational wonder is to be found in the intricacy and
manifoldness of things. We get a suggestion of endless resources in the
creation of individualities. Over two thousand years ago Aristotle knew
about five hundred different kinds of animals; and now the list of the
named and known includes twenty-five thousand different kinds of back-
boned animals, and a quarter of a million — some insist on a minimum of
half a million — backboneless animals, each itself and no other. For "all
flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another
flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The blood of a
horse is different from that of an ass, and one can often identify a bird
from a single feather or a fish from a few scales. One is not perhaps
greatly thrilled by the fact that the average man has twenty-five billions
of oxygen-capturing red blood corpuscles, which if spread out would oc-
cupy a surface of 3,300 square yards; but there is significance in the cal-
culation that he has in the cerebral cortex of his brain, the home of the
higher intellectual activities, some nine thousand millions of nerve cells,
that is to say, more than five times the present population of the globe —
surely more than the said brain as yet makes use of.

So it must be granted that we are fearfully and wonderfully made! Our
body is built up of millions of cells, yet there is a simplicity amid the
multitudinousness, for each cell has the same fundamental structure.
Within the colloid cell-substance there floats a kernel or nucleus, which
contains forty-seven (or in woman forty-eight) chromosomes, each with
a bead-like arrangement of smaller microsomes, and so on, and so on.
Similarly, while eighty-nine different elements have been discovered out
of the theoretically possible ninety-two, we know that they differ from
one another only in the number and distribution of the electrons and pro-
tons that make up their microcosmic planetary system. What artistry to
weave the gorgeously varied tapestry of the world out of two kinds of

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD 13

physical thread — besides, of course, Mind, which eventually searches into
the secret of the loom.

A fourth basis for rational wonder is in the orderliness of Nature, and
that is almost the same thing as saying its intelligibility. What implications
there are in the fact that man has been able to make a science of Nature!
Given three good observations of a comet, the astronomer can predict its
return to a night. It is not a phantasmagoria that we live in, it is a rational-
isable cosmos. The more science advances the more the fortuitous shrivels,
and the more the power of prophecy grows. Two astronomers foretold the
discovery of Neptune; the chemists have anticipated the discovery of new
elements; the biologist can not only count but portray his chickens before
they are hatched. The Order of Nature is the largest of all certainties; and
leading authorities in modern physics tell us that we cannot think of it as
emerging from the fortuitous. It is time that the phrase "a fortuitous con-
course of atoms" was buried. Even the aboriginal nebula was not that\ No
doubt there have been diseases and tragedies among men, cataclysms and
volcanic eruptions upon the earth, and so on — no one denies the shadows;
but even these disturbances are not disorderly; the larger fact is the ab-
sence of all caprice. To refer to the poet's famous line, no one any longer
supposes that gravitation can possibly cease when he goes by the avalanche.
Nor will a microbe's insurgence be influenced by the social importance of
the patient.

Corresponding to the intelligibility of Nature is the pervasiveness of
beauty — a fifth basis of rational wonder, appealing to the emotional side
of our personality. Surely Lotze was right, that it is of high value to look
upon beauty not as a stranger in the world, nor as a casual aspect of cer-
tain phenomena, but as "the fortunate revelation of that principle which
permeates all reality with its living activity."

A sixth basis of rational wonder is to be found in the essential character-
istics of living creatures. We need only add the caution that the marvel of
life is not to be taken at its face value; as Coleridge wisely said, the first
wonder is the child of ignorance; we must attend diligently to all that
biochemistry and biophysics can discount; we must try to understand all
that can be formulated in terms of colloids, and so on. Yet when all that
is said, there seem to be large residual phenomena whose emergence in
living creatures reveal a new depth in Nature. Life is an enduring, in-
surgent activity, growing, multiplying, developing, enregistering, varying,
and above all else evolving.

For this is the seventh wonder — Evolution. It is not merely that all
things flow; it is that life flows uphill. Amid the ceaseless flux there is
not only conservation, there is advancement. The changes are not those of

14 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

a kaleidoscope, but of "an onward advancing melody." As the unthink-
ably long ages passed the earth became the cradle and home of life; nobler
and finer kinds of living creatures appeared; there was a growing vic-
tory of life over things and of "mind" over "body"; until at last appeared
Man, who is Life's crowning wonder, since he has given to everything
else a higher and deeper significance. And while we must consider man
in the light of evolution, as most intellectual combatants admit, there is
the even more difficult task of envisaging evolution in the light of Man.
Finis coronat opus — a wise philosophical axiom; and yet the scientist must
qualify it by asking who can say Finis to Evolution.

1931

We Are All Scientists

T. H. HUXLEY

From Darwiniana

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION IS NOT, AS MANY PEOPLE
seem to suppose, some kind of modern black art. You might easily
gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of
scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the
principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast
number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contempti-
ble as the pseudo-scientific cant which is talked about the "Baconian
philosophy."

To hear people talk about the great Chancellor — and a very great man
he certainly was, — you would think that it was he who had invented
science, and that there was no such thing as sound reasoning before the
time of Queen Elizabeth! Of course you say, that cannot possibly be true;
you perceive, OIL a moment's reflection, that such an idea is absurdly
wrong. . . .

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS 15

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression
of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply
the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise
and exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of
difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those
of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of
a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the
operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by
means of his balance and finely-graduated weights. It is not that the action
of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the
principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of
one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by
the addition of a much smaller weight.

You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar
example. You have all heard it repeated, I dare say, that men of science
work by means of induction and deduction, and that by the help of
these operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain
other things, which are called natural laws, and causes, and that out of
these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up hypotheses
and theories. And it is imagined by many, that the operations of the
common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and
that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the
craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of
a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow
men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that
you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus are being
used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.

There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's plays, where the
author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he
had been talking prose during the whole of his life. In the same way,
I trust, that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on
the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive
and deductive philosophy during the same period. Probably there is not
one who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a
complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing of
course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing
the causes of natural phenomena.

A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go
into a fruiterer's shop, wanting an apple, — you take up one, and, on biting
it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green. You
take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shopman

16 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

offers you a third; but, before biting it, you examine it, and find that it
is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not have it,
as it must be sour, like those that you have already tried.

Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; but if you will take
the trouble to analyse and trace out into its logical elements what has
been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place,
you have performed the operation of induction. You found that, in two
experiences, hardness and greenness in apples went together with sour-
ness. It was so in the first case, and it was confirmed by the second. True,
it is a very small basis, but still it is enough to make an induction from;
you generalise the facts, and you expect to find sourness in apples where
you get hardness and greenness. You found upon that a general law, that
all hard and green apples are sour; and that, so far as it goes, is a
perfect induction. Well, having got your natural law in this way, when
you are offered another apple which you find is hard and green, you say,
"All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green, there-
fore this apple is sour." That train of reasoning is what logicians call a
syllogism, and has all its various parts and terms — its major premiss, its
minor premiss, and its conclusion. And, by the help of further reason-
ing, which, if drawn out, would have to be exhibited in two or three other
syllogisms, you arrive at your final determination, "I will not have that
apple." So that, you see, you have, in the first place, established a law by
induction, and upon that you have founded a deduction, and reasoned out
the special conclusion of the particular case. Well now, suppose, having
got your law, that at some time afterwards, you are discussing the qualities
of apples with a friend: you will say to him, "It is a very curious thing, —
but I find that all hard and green apples are sour!" Your friend says to
you, "But how do you know that?" You at once reply, "Oh, because I have
tried them over and over again, and have always found them to be so."
Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should call
that an experimental verification. And, if still opposed, you go further, and
say, "I have heard from the people in Somersetshire and Devonshire,
where a large number of apples are grown, that they have observed the
same thing. It is also found to be the case in Normandy, and in North
America. In short, I find it to be the universal experience of mankind
wherever attention has been directed to the subject." Whereupon, your
friend, unless he is a very unreasonable man, agrees with you, and is
convinced that you are quite right in the conclusion you have drawn.
He believes, although perhaps he does not know he believes it, that the
more extensive verifications are, — that the more frequently experiments
have been made, and results of the same kind arrived at, — that the more

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS 17

varied the conditions under which the same results are attained, the more
certain is the ultimate conclusion, and he disputes the question no further.
He sees that the experiment has been tried under all sorts of conditions,
as to time, place, and people, with the same result; and he says with you,
therefore, that the law you have laid down must be a good one, and he
must believe it.

In science we do the same thing; — the philosopher exercises precisely
the same faculties, though in a much more delicate manner. In scientific
inquiry it becomes a matter of duty to expose a supposed law to every
possible kind of verification, and to take care, moreover, that this is done
intentionally, and not left to a mere accident, as in the case of the apples.
And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact pro-
portion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental veri-
fications. For instance, if you let go your grasp of an article you may have
in your hand, it will immediately fall to the ground. That is a very com-
mon verification of one of the best established laws of nature — that of
gravitation. The method by which men of science establish the existence
of that law is exactly the same as that by which we have established the
trivial proposition about the sourness of hard and green apples. But we
believe it in such an extensive, thorough, and unhesitating manner because
the universal experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it our-
selves at any time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which
any natural law can rest.

So much, then, by way of proof that the method of establishing laws in
science is exactly the same as that pursued in common life. Let us now
turn to another matter (though really it is but another phase of the same
question), and that is, the method by which, from the relations of certain
phenomena, we prove that some stand in the position of causes towards
the others.

I want to put the case clearly before you, and I will therefore show you
what I mean by another familiar example. I will suppose that one of you,
on coming down in the morning to the parlour of your house, finds that
a tea-pot and some spoons which had been left in the room on the previous
evening are gone, — the window is open, and you observe the mark of a
dirty hand on the window-frame, and perhaps, in addition to that, you
notice the impress of a hob-nailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these
phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before two seconds
have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the window, entered
the room, and run off with the spoons and the tea-pot!" That speech is out
of your mouth in a moment. And you will probably add, "I know there
has; I am quite sure of it!" You mean to say exactly what you know;

18 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

but in reality you are giving expression to what is, in all essential partic-
ulars, an hypothesis. You do not \nous it at all; it is nothing but an
hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. And it is an hypothesis
founded on a long train of inductions and deductions.

What are those inductions and deductions, and how have you got at
this hypothesis? You have observed, in the first place, that the window is
open; but by a train of reasoning involving many inductions and deduc-
tions, you have probably arrived long before at the general law — and a
very good one it is — that windows do not open of themselves; and you
therefore conclude that something has opened the window. A second
general law that you have arrived at in the same way is, that tea-pots and
spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously, and you are satisfied
that, as they are not now where you left them, they have been removed.
In the third place, you look at the marks on the window-sill, and the shoe-
marks outside, and you say that in all previous experience the former
kind of mark has never been produced by anything else but the hand of
a human being; and the same experience shows that no other animal but
man at present wears shoes with hob-nails in them such as would produce
the marks in the gravel. I do not know, even if we could discover any of
those "missing links" that are talked about, that they would help us to
any other conclusion! At any rate the law which states our present experi-
ence is strong enough for my present purpose. You next reach the conclu-
sion, that as these kinds of marks have not been left by any other animals
than men, or are liable to be formed in any other way than by a man's
hand and shoe, the marks in question have been formed by a man in that
way. You have, further, a general law, founded on observation and
experience, and that, too, is, I am sorry to say, a very universal and unim-
peachable one, — that some men are thieves; and you assume at once from
all these premisses — and that is what constitutes your hypothesis — that the
man who made the marks outside and on the window-sill, opened the
window, got into the room, and stole your tea-pot and spoons. You have
now arrived at a vera causa; — you have assumed a cause which, it is plain,
is competent to produce all the phenomena you have observed. You can
explain all these phenomena only by the hypothesis of a thief. But that is
a hypothetical conclusion, of the justice of which you have no absolute
proof at all; it is only rendered highly probable by a series of inductive and
deductive reasonings.

I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a man of ordinary
common sense, and that you have established this hypothesis to your own
satisfaction, will very likely be to go for the police, and set them on the
track of the burglar, with the view to the recovery of your property. But

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS 19

just as you are starting with this object, some person comes in, and on
learning what you are about, says, "My good friend, you are going on a
great deal too fast. How do you know that the man who really made the
marks took the spoons? It might have been a monkey that took them, and
the man may have merely looked in afterwards." You would probably
reply, "Well, that is all very well, but you see it is contrary to all experience
of the way tea-pots and spoons are abstracted; so that, at any rate, your
hypothesis is less probable than mine." While you are talking the thing
over in this way, another friend arrives. And he might say, "Oh, my dear
sir, you are certainly going on a great deal too fast. You are most presump-
tuous. You admit that all these occurrences took place when you were
fast asleep, at a time when you could not possibly have known anything
about what was taking place. How do you know that the laws of Nature
are not suspended during the night? It may be that there has been some
kind of supernatural interference in this case." In point of fact, he declares
that your hypothesis is one of which you cannot at all demonstrate the
truth and that you are by no means sure that the laws of Nature are the
same when you are asleep as when you are awake.

Well, now, you cannot at the moment answer that kind of reasoning.
You feel that your worthy friend has you somewhat at a disadvantage.
You will feel perfectly convinced in your own mind, however, that you are
quite right, and you say to him, "My good friend, I can only be guided by
the natural probabilities of the case, and if you will be kind enough
to stand aside and permit me to pass, I will go and fetch the police."
Well, we will suppose that your journey is successful, and that by good
luck you meet with a policeman; that eventually the burglar is found with
your property on his person, and the marks correspond to his hand and to
his boots. Probably any jury would consider those facts a very good
experimental verification of your hypothesis, touching the cause of the
abnormal phenomena observed in your parlour, and would act accordingly.

Now, in this suppositious case, I have taken phenomena of a very com-
mon kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in an
ordinary process of reasoning, if you will only take the trouble to analyse
it carefully. All the operations I have described, you will see, are involved
in the mind of any man of sense in leading him to a conclusion as to the
course he should take in order to make good a robbery and punish the
offender. I say that you are led, in that case, to your conclusion by exactly
the same train of reasoning as that which a man of science pursues when
he is endeavouring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult
phenomena. The process is, and always must be, the same; and precisely
the same mode of reasoning was employed by Newton and Laplace in

20 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

their endeavours to discover and define the causes of the movements of
the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would
employ to detect a burglar. The only difference is, that the nature of the
inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched,
so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. A
flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or
no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which
we may arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is
always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly produc-
tive of mischievous, if not fatal results.

Do not allow yourselves to be misled by the common notion that an
hypothesis is untrustworthy simply because it is an hypothesis. It is often
urged, in respect to some scientific conclusion, that, after all, it is only an
hypothesis. But what more have we to guide us in nine-tenths of the
most important affairs of daily life than hypotheses, and often very ill-
based ones? So that in science, where the evidence of an hypothesis is
subjected to the most rigid examination, we may rightly pursue the same
course. You may have hypotheses and hypotheses. A man may say, if he
likes, that the moon is made of green cheese: that is an hypothesis. But
another man, who has devoted a great deal of time and attention to the
subject, and availed himself of the most powerful telescopes and the
results of the observations of others, declares that in his opinion it is
probably composed of materials very similar to those of which our own
earth is made up: and that is also only an hypothesis. But I need not
tell you that there is an enormous difference in the value of the two
hypotheses. That one which is based on sound scientific knowledge is sure
to have a corresponding value; and that which is a mere hasty
random guess is likely to have but little value. Every great step in our
progress in discovering causes has been made in exactly the same way as
that which I have detailed to you. A person observing the occurrence of
certain facts and phenomena asks, naturally enough, what process, what
kind of operation known to occur in Nature applied to the particular case,
will unravel and explain the mystery? Hence you have the scientific
hypothesis; and its value will be proportionate to the care and completeness
with which its basis has been tested and verified. It is in these matters as in
the commonest affairs of practical life: the guess of the fool will be folly,
while the guess of the wise man will contain wisdom. In all cases, you see
that the value of the result depends on the patience and faithfulness with
which the investigator applies to his hypothesis every possible kind of
verification. . . .

1863

Scientists Are Lonely Men

OLIVER LA FARGE

IT IS NOT SO LONG AGO THAT, EVEN IN MY DILETTANTE
study of the science of ethnology, I corresponded with men in Ireland,
Sweden, Germany, France, and Yucatan, and had some discussion with
a Chinese. One by one these interchanges were cut off; in some countries
the concept of science is dead, and even in the free strongholds of Britain
and the Americas pure science is being — must be — set aside in favor of
what is immediately useful and urgently needed. It must hibernate now;
for a while all it means is likely to be forgotten.

It has never been well understood. Scientists have never been good at
explaining themselves and, frustrated by this, they tend to withdraw into
the esoteric, refer to the public as "laymen," and develop incomprehensible
vocabularies from which they draw a naive, secret-society feeling of
superiority.

What is the special nature of a scientist as distinguished from a soda-
jerker? Not just the externals such as his trick vocabulary, but the human
formation within the man? Most of what is written about him is rot; but
there is stuff there which a writer can get his teeth into, and it has its vivid,
direct relation to all that we are fighting for.

The inner nature of science within the scientist is both emotional and
intellectual. The emotional element must not be overlooked, for without
it there is no sound research on however odd and dull-seeming a subject.
As is true of all of us, an emotion shapes and forms the scientist's life;
at the same time an intellectual discipline molds his thinking, stamping
him with a character as marked as a seaman's although much less widely
understood.

To an outsider who does not know of this emotion, the scientist suggests
an ant, putting forth great efforts to lug one insignificant and apparently
unimportant grain of sand to be added to a pile, and much of the time his

22 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

struggle seems as pointless as an ant's. I can try to explain why he does it
and what the long-term purpose is behind it through an example from my
own work. Remember that in this I am not thinking of the rare, fortunate
geniuses like the Curies, Darwin, or Newton, who by their own talents
and the apex of accumulated thought at which they stood were knowingly
in pursuit of great, major discoveries. This is the average scientist, one
among thousands, obscure, unimportant, toilsome.

I have put in a good many months of hard work, which ought by usual
standards to have been dull but was not, on an investigation as yet un-
finished to prove that Kanhobal, spoken by certain Indians in Guatemala,
is not a dialect of Jacalteca, but that, on the contrary, Jacalteca is a dialect
of Kanhobal. Ridiculous, isn't it? Yet to me the matter is not only serious
but exciting. Why ?

There is an item of glory. There are half a dozen or so men now living
(some now, unfortunately, our enemies) who will pay me attention and
respect if I prove my thesis. A slightly larger number, less interested in the
details of my work, will give credit to La Farge for having added to the
linguistic map of Central America the name of a hitherto unnoted dialect.
But not until I have told a good deal more can I explain — as I shall pres-
ently— why the notice of so few individuals can constitute a valid glory.

There's the nature of the initial work. I have spent hours, deadly, difficult
hours, extracting lists of words, paradigms of verbs, constructions, idioms,
and the rest from native informants, often at night in over-ventilated huts
while my hands turned blue with cold. (Those mountains are far from
tropical.) An illiterate Indian tires quickly when giving linguistic informa-
tion. He is not accustomed to thinking of words in terms of other words;
his command of Spanish is so poor that again and again you labor over
misunderstandings; he does not think in our categories of words. Take
any schoolchild and ask him how you say, "I go." Then ask him in turn,
"Thou goest, he goes, we go." Even the most elementary schooling has
taught him, if only from the force of staring resentfully at the printed
page, to think in terms of the present tense of a single verb — that is, to
conjugate. He will give you, in Spanish for instance, "Me voy, te vas> se va>
nos vamos" &\\ in order. Try this on an illiterate Indian. He gives you his
equivalent of "I go," follows it perhaps with "thou goest," but the next
question reminds him of his son's departure that morning for Ixtatan, so
he answers "he sets out," and from that by another mental leap produces
"we are traveling." This presents the investigator with a magnificently
irregular verb. He starts checking back, and the Indian's mind being set
in the new channel, he now gets "I travel" instead of "I go."

There follows an exhausting process of inserting an alien concept into

SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN 23

the mind of a man with whom you are communicating tenuously in a
language which you speak only pretty well and he quite badly.

Then of course you come to a verb which really is irregular and you
mistrust it. Both of you become tired, frustrated, upset. At the end of an
hour or so the Indian is worn out, his friendship for you has materially
decreased, and you yourself are glad to quit.

Hours and days of this, and it's not enough. I have put my finger upon
the village of Santa Eulalia and said, "Here is the true, the classic Kan-
hobal from which the other dialects diverge." Then I must sample the
others; there are at least eight villages which must yield me up fairly com-
plete word-lists and two from which my material should be as complete
as from Santa Eulalia. More hours and more days, long horseback trips
across the mountains to enter strange, suspicious settlements, sleep on the
dirt floor of the schoolhouse, and persuade the astonished yokelry that it
is a good idea, a delightful idea, that you should put "The Tongue1' into
writing. Bad food, a bout of malaria, and the early-morning horror of
seeing your beloved horse's neck running blood from vampire bats ("Oh,
but, yes, sefior, everyone knows that here are very troublesome the vam-
pire bats"), to get the raw material for proving that Jacalteca is a dialect
of Kanhobal instead of ...

You bring your hard-won data back to the States and you follow up with
a sort of detective-quest for obscure publications and old manuscripts
which may show a couple of words of the language as it was spoken a
few centuries ago, so that you can get a line on its evolution. With great
labor you unearth and read the very little that has been written bearing
upon this particular problem.

By now the sheer force of effort expended gives your enterprise value in
your own eyes. And you still have a year's work to put all your data in
shape, test your conclusions, and demonstrate your proof.

Yet the real emotional drive goes beyond all this. Suppose I complete my
work and prove, in fact, that Kanhobal as spoken in Santa Eulalia is a
language in its own right and the classic tongue from which Jacalteca has
diverged under alien influences, and that, further, I show just where the
gradations of speech in the intervening villages fit in. Dear God, what a
small, dull grain of sand!

But follow the matter a little farther. Jacalteca being relatively well-
known (I can, offhand, name four men who have given it some study),
from it it has been deduced that this whole group of dialects is most closely
related to the languages spoken south and east of these mountains. If my
theory is correct, the reverse is true — the group belongs to the Northern
Division of the Mayan Family. This fact, taken along with others regard-

24 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

ing physical appearance, ancient remains, and present culture, leads to a
new conclusion about the direction from which these tribes came into the
mountains: a fragment of the ancient history of what was once a great,
civilized people comes into view. So now my tiny contribution begins to
be of help to men working in other branches of anthropology than my
own, particularly to the archaeologists; it begins to help toward an even-
tual understanding of the whole picture in this area: the important ques-
tion of, not what these people are to-day, but how they got that way and
what we can learn from that about all human behavior including our
own.

Even carrying the line of research as far as this assumes that my results
have been exploited by men of greater attainments than I. Sticking to the
linguistic line, an error has been cleared away, an advance has been made
in our understanding of the layout and interrelationship of the many lan-
guages making up the Mayan Family. With this we come a step nearer to
working out the processes by which these languages became different from
one another and hence to determining the archaic, ancestral roots of the
whole group.

So far as we know at present, there are not less than eight completely
unrelated language families in America north of Panama. This is un-
reasonable: there are hardly that many families among all the peoples of
the Old World. Twenty years ago we recognized not eight, but forty.
Some day perhaps we shall cut the total to four. The understanding of the
Mayan process is a step toward that day; it is unlikely that Mayan will
remain an isolated way of speech unconnected with any other. We know
now that certain tribes in Wyoming speak languages akin to those of
others in Panama; we have charted the big masses and islands of that
group of tongues and from the chart begin to see the outlines of great
movements and crashing historical events in the dim past. If we should
similarly develop a relationship between Mayan and, let's say, the lan-
guages of the Mississippi Valley, again we should offer something provoc-
ative to the archaeologist, the historian, the student of mankind. Some
day we shall show an unquestionable kinship between some of these
families and certain languages of the Old World and with it cast a new
light on the dim subject of the peopling of the Americas, something to
guide our minds back past the Arctic to dark tribes moving blindly from
the high plateaus of Asia.

My petty detail has its place in a long project carried out by many men
which will serve not only the history of language but the broad scope of
history itself. It goes farther than that. The humble Pah-Utes of Nevada
speak a tongue related to that which the subtle Montezuma used, the one

SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN 25

narrow in scope, evolved only to meet the needs of a primitive people, the
other sophisticated, a capable instrument for poetry, for an advanced gov-
ernmental system, and for philosophical speculation. Men's thoughts make
language and their languages make thought. When the matter of the
speech of mankind is fully known and laid side by side with all the other
knowledges, the philosophers, the men who stand at the gathering-together
point of science, will have the means to make man understand himself
at last.

Of course no scientist can be continuously aware of such remote possible
consequences of his labors; in fact the long goal is so remote that if he
kept his eyes on it he would become hopelessly discouraged over the half
inch of progress his own life's work will represent. But it was the vision
of this which first made him choose his curious career, and it is an emo-
tional sense of the great structure of scientific knowledge to which his
little grain will be added which drives him along.

I spoke of the item of glory, the half dozen colleagues who will appre-
ciate one's work. To understand that one must first understand the isola-
tion of research, a factor which has profound effects upon the scientist's
psyche.

The most obvious statement of this is in the public attitude and folk-
literature about "professors." The titles and subjects of Ph.D. theses have
long been sources of exasperated humor among us; we are all familiar
with the writer's device which ascribes to a professorial character an in-
tense interest in some such matter as the development of the molars in
pre-Aurignacian man or the religious sanctions of the Levirate in north-
eastern Australia, the writer's intention being that the reader shall say "Oh
God!", smile slightly, and pigeonhole the character. But what do you sup-
pose is the effect of the quite natural public attitude behind these devices
upon the man who is excitedly interested in pre-Aurignacian molars and
who knows that this is a study of key value in tracing the evolution of
Homo sapiens?

Occasionally some line of research is taken up and made clear, even fasci-
nating, to the general public, as in Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History, or de
Kruif's rather Sunday-supplement writings. Usually, as in these cases, they
deal with medicine or some other line of work directly resulting in findings
of vital interest to the public. Then the ordinary man will consent to under-
stand, if not the steps of the research itself, at least its importance, will
grant the excitement, and honor the researcher. When we read Eve Curie's
great biography of her parents our approach to it is colored by our knowl-

26 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

edge, forty years later, of the importance of their discovery to every one
of us. It would have been quite possible at the time for a malicious or
merely ignorant writer to have presented that couple as archetypes of the
"professor," performing incomprehensible acts of self-immolation in
pursuit of an astronomically unimportant what's-it.

Diving to my own experience like a Stuka with a broken wing, I con-
tinue to take my examples from my rather shallow linguistic studies be-
cause, in its very nature, the kind of thing a linguist studies is so beauti-
fully calculated to arouse the "Oh God!" emotion.

It happened that at the suggestion of my letters I embarked upon an
ambitious, general comparative study of the whole Mayan Family. The
farther in I got the farther there was to go and the more absorbed I be-
came. Puzzle piled upon puzzle to be worked out and the solution used
for getting after the next one, the beginning of order in chaos, the glimpse
of understanding at the far end. Memory, reasoning faculties, realism, and
imagination were all on the stretch; I was discovering the full reach of
whatever mental powers I had. When I say that I became absorbed I
mean absorbed; the only way to do such research is to roll in it, become
soaked in it, live it, breathe it, have your system so thoroughly permeated
with it that at the half glimpse of a fugitive possibility everything you
have learned so far and everything you have been holding in suspension
is in order and ready to prove or disprove that point. You do not only
think about your subject while the documents are spread before you;
everyone knows that some of our best reasoning is done when the surface
of the mind is occupied with something else and the deep machinery of
the brain is free to work unhampered.

One day I was getting aboard a trolley car in New Orleans on my way
to Tulane University. As I stepped up I saw that if it were possible to
prove that a prefixed s- could change into a prefixed y- a whole series of
troublesome phenomena would fall into order. The transition must come
through u- and, thought I with a sudden lift of excitement, there may be
a breathing associated with u- and that may make the whole thing pos-
sible. As I paid the conductor I thought that the evidence I needed might
exist in Totonac and Tarascan, non-Mayan languages with which I was
not familiar. The possibilities were so tremendous that my heart pounded
and I was so preoccupied that I nearly went to sit in the Jim Crow sec-
tion. Speculation was useless until I could reach the University and dig
out the books, so after a while I calmed myself and settled to my morning
ration of Popeye, who was then a new discovery too. As a matter of fact,
the idea was no good, but the incident is a perfect example of the "profes-
sor mind."

SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN 27

Of course, i£ as I stepped on to the car it had dawned upon me that the
reason my girl's behavior last evening had seemed odd was that she had
fallen for the Englishman we had met, the incident would not have seemed
so funny, although the nature of the absorption, subconscious thinking,
and realization would have been the same in both cases.

I lived for a month with the letter ^. If we have three words in Quiche,
one of the major Mayan languages, beginning with ^, in Kanhobal we
are likely to find that one of these begins with ch. Moving farther west
and north, in Tzeltal one is likely to begin with ^, one with ch, and the
one which began with ch in Kanhobal to begin with ts. In Hausteca, at
the extreme northwest, they begin with ^, ts, and plain s respectively. Why
don't they all change alike? Which is the original form? Which way do
these changes run, or from which point do they run both ways? Until
those questions can be answered we cannot even guess at the form of the
mother tongue from which these languages diverged, and at that point all
investigation halts. Are these J(s in Quiche pronounced even faintly
unlike? I noticed no difference between the two in Kanhobal, but then I
wasn't listening for it. I wished someone properly equipped would go and
listen to the Quiche Indians, and wondered if I could talk the University
into giving me money enough to do so.

This is enough to give some idea of the nature of my work, and its use-
lessness for general conversation. My colleagues at Tulane were archae-
ologists. Shortly after I got up steam they warned me frankly that I had
to stop trying to tell them about the variability of ^, the history of Puctun
tyy or any similar matter. If I produced any results that they could apply, I
could tell them about it; but apart from that I could keep my damned
sound-shifts and intransitive infixes to myself; I was driving them nuts.
My other friends on the faculty were a philosopher and two English pro-
fessors; I was pursuing two girls at the time but had not been drawn to
either because of intellectual interests in common; my closest friends were
two painters and a sculptor. The only person I could talk to was myself.

The cumulative effect of this non-communication was terrific. A strange,
mute work, a thing crying aloud for discussion, emotional expression, the
check and reassurance of another's point of view, turned in upon myself
to boil and fume, throwing upon me the responsibility of being my own
sole check, my own impersonal, external critic. When finally I came to
New York on vacation I went to see my Uncle John. He doesn't know
Indian languages but he is a student of linguistics, and I shall never forget
the relief, the reveling pleasure, of pouring my work out to him.

Thus at the vital point of his life-work the scientist is cut off from com-
munication with his fellow-men. Instead, he has the society of two, six, or

28 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

twenty men and women who are working in his specialty, with whom he
corresponds, whose letters he receives like a lover, with whom when he
meets them he wallows in an orgy of talk, in the keen pleasure of conclu-
sions and findings compared, matched, checked against one another — the
pure joy of being really understood.

The praise and understanding of those two or six become for him the
equivalent of public recognition. Around these few close colleagues is the
larger group of workers in the same general field. They do not share with
one in the steps of one's research, but they can read the results, tell in a
general way if they have been soundly reached, and profit by them. To
them McGarnigle "has shown" that there are traces of an ancient, doli-
chocephalic strain among the skeletal remains from Pusilha, which is
something they can use. Largely on the strength of his close colleagues'
judgment of him, the word gets round that McGarnigle is a sound man.
You can trust his work. He's the fellow you want to have analyze the
material if you turn up an interesting bunch of skulls. All told, including
men in allied fields who use his findings, some fifty scientists praise him;
before them he has achieved international reputation. He will receive hon-
ors. It is even remotely possible that he might get a raise in salary.

McGarnigle disinters himself from a sort of fortress made of boxes full
of skeletons in the cellar of Podunk University's Hall of Science, and
emerges into the light of day to attend a Congress. At the Congress he
delivers a paper entitled Additional Evidence of Dolichocephaly among
the Eighth Cycle Maya before the Section on Physical Anthropology. In
the audience are six archaeologists specializing in the Maya field, to whom
these findings have a special importance, and twelve physical anthropol-
ogists including Gruenwald of Eastern California, who is the only other
man working on Maya remains.

After McGarnigle's paper comes Gruenwald's turn. Three other physi-
cal anthropologists, engaged in the study of the Greenland Eskimo, the
Coastal Chinese, and the Pleistocene Man of Lake Mojave respectively,
come in. They slipped out for a quick one while McGarnigle was speak-
ing because his Maya work is not particularly useful to them and they can
read the paper later; what is coming next, with its important bearing on
method and theory, they would hate to miss.

Gruenwald is presenting a perfectly horrible algebraic formula and a
diagram beyond Rube Goldberg's wildest dream, showing A Formula for
Approximating the Original Indices of Artificially Deformed Crania.
(These titles are not mere parodies; they are entirely possible.) The archae-
ologists depart hastily to hear a paper in their own section on Indica-
tion^ of an Early Quinary System at Uaxactun. The formula is intensely

SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN 29

exciting to McGarnigle because it was the custom of the ancient Mayas
to remodel the heads of their children into shapes which they (errone-
ously) deemed handsomer than nature's. He and Gruenwald have been
corresponding about this; at one point Gruenwald will speak of his col-
league's experience in testing the formula; he has been looking forward
to this moment for months.

After the day's sessions are over will come something else he has been
looking forward to. He and Gruenwald, who have not seen each other in
two years, go out and get drunk together. It is not that they never get
drunk at home, but that now when in their cups they can be uninhibited,
they can talk their own, private, treble-esoteric shop. It is an orgy of
release.

In the course of their drinking it is likely — if an archaeologist or two
from the area joins them it is certain — that the talk will veer from femoral
pilasters' and alveolar prognathism to personal experiences in remote sec-
tions of the Peten jungle. For in my science and a number of others there
is yet another frustration.

We go into the field and there we have interesting experiences. The
word "adventure" is taboo and "explore" is used very gingerly. But the
public mind has been so poisoned by the outpourings of bogus explorers
that it is laden with claptrap about big expeditions, dangers, hardships,
hostile tribes, the lighting of red flares around the camp to keep the sav-
ages at bay, and God knows what rot. (I can speak freely about this be-
cause my own expeditions have been so unambitious and in such easy
country that I don't come into the subject.) As a matter of fact it is gen-
erally true that for a scientist on an expedition to have an adventure is
evidence of a fault in his technique. He is sent out to gather information,
and he has no business getting into "a brush with the natives."

The red-flare, into-the-unknown, hardship-and-danger boys, who man-
age to find a tribe of pink-and-green Indians, a lost city, or the original,
handpainted descendants of the royal Incas every time they go out, usually
succeed in so riling the natives and local whites upon whom scientists
must depend if they are to live in the country as to make work in the
zones they contaminate difficult for years afterward. The business of their
adventures and discoveries is sickening. . . .

These men by training express themselves in factual, "extensional"
terms, which don't make for good adventure stories. They understand-
ably lean over backward to avoid sounding even remotely like the frauds,

30 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

the "explorers." And then what they have seen and done lacks validity to
them if it cannot be told in relation to the purpose and dominant emotion
which sent them there. McGarnigle went among the independent Indians
of Icaiche because he had heard of a skull kept in one of their temples
which, from a crude description, seemed to have certain important char-
acteristics. All his risks and his maneuverings v/ith those tough, explosive
Indians centered around the problem of gaining access to that skull. When
he tries to tell an attractive girl about his experiences he not only under-
states, but can't keep from stressing the significance of a skull with a
healed, clover-leaf trepan. The girl gladly leaves him for the nearest
broker. . . .

It is too bad both for the scientists and the public that they are so cut
off from each other. The world needs now not the mere knowledges of
science, but the way of thought and the discipline. It is the essence of
what Hitler has set out to destroy; against it he has waged total war within
his own domain. It is more than skepticism, the weighing of evidence
more even than the love of truth. It is the devotion of oneself to an end
which is far more important than the individual, the certainty that the
end is absolutely good, not only for oneself but for all mankind, and the
character to set personal advantage, comfort, and glory aside in the de-
voted effort to make even a little progress toward it.

Turtle Eggs for Agassiz

DALLAS LORE SHARP

YT IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD THAT SO
-"* few books are written. With every human being a possible book, and
with many a human being capable of becoming more books than the
world could contain, is it not amazing that the books of men are so few?
And so stupid!

I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the
four volumes of Agassiz's Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States. I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster,
had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are an excessively
learned, a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit of vast and
heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the
United States, and their embryology. The work was published more than
half a century ago (by subscription) ; but it looked old beyond its years —
massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks. It was difficult to feel
that Agassiz could have written it — could have built it, grown it, for the
laminated pile had required for its growth the patience and painstaking
care of a process of nature, as if it were a kind of printed coral reef. Agas-
siz do this? The big, human, magnetic man at work upon these pages of
capital letters, Roman figures, brackets, and parentheses in explanation of
the pages of diagrams and plates! I turned away with a sigh from the
weary learning, to read the preface.

When a great man writes a great book he usually flings a preface after
it, and thereby saves it, sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not, the
best things in most books are their prefaces. It was not, however, the qual-
ity of the preface to these great volumes that interested me, but rather the
wicked waste of durable book material that went to its making. Reading
down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks for help re-
ceived, I came to a sentence beginning: —

"In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also re-

32 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

ceived valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Bur-
lington . . . from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord . . . and from Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro." And then it hastens on with the thanks in
order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of real
importance in all the world.

Turtles no doubt are important, extremely important, embryologically,
as part of our genealogical tree; but they are away down among the roots
of the tree as compared with the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burling-
ton. I happen to know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me he looks
very interesting. Indeed any reverend gentleman of his name and day
who would catch turtles for Agassiz must have been interesting. And as
for Henry Thoreau, we know he was interesting. The rarest wood turtle
in the United States was not so rare a specimen as this gentleman of Wai-
den Woods and Concord. We are glad even for this line in the preface
about him; glad to know that he tried, in this untranscendental way, to
serve his day and generation. If Agassiz had only put a chapter in his
turtle book about it! But this is the material he wasted, this and more of
the same human sort, for the Mr. "Jenks of Middleboro" (at the end of the
quotation) was, years later, an old college professor of mine, who told me
some of the particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars which Agas-
siz should have found a place for in his big book. The preface says merely
that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the thousands — brief
and scanty recognition. For that is not the only thing this gentleman did.
On one occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle eggs to Cambridge —
brought them, I should say; and all there is to show for it, so far as I
could discover, is a sectional drawing of a bit of the mesoblastic layer of
one of the eggs!

Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that mesoblastic drawing, or some
other equally important drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg to
draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when he
wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, always gets it, for he gets
someone else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad and im-
patient is that he did not think it worth while to tell about the getting of
it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of what might have been an
exceedingly interesting human book.

It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or inter-
esting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them. Nothing at
all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to find them. So
with anything else — good copper stock, for instance, if you should chance
to want it, and should chance to be along when they chance to be giving
it away. But if you want copper stock, say of C & H quality, when you

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 33

want it, and are bound to have it, then you must command more than a
college professor's salary. And likewise, precisely, when it is turtle eggs
that you are bound to have.

Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them — not a minute
over three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does not
seem exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hen eggs only
three hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have had his private
turtle coop in Harvard Yard; and provided he could have made his turtles
lay. But turtles will not respond, like hens, to meat scraps and the warm
mash. The professor's problem was not to get from a mud turtle's nest in
the back yard to the table in the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory
in Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were laying, and back to
the laboratory within the limited time. And this, in the days of Darius
Green, might have called for nice and discriminating work — as it did.

Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his Contributions. He
had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished but
for one small yet very important bit of observation: he had carried the
turtle egg through every stage of its development with the single excep-
tion of one — the very earliest — that stage of first cleavages, when the cell
begins to segment, immediately upon its being laid. That beginning stage
had brought the Contributions to a halt. To get eggs that were fresh
enough to show the incubation at this period had been impossible.

There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might
have got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory to
some pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should catch
the reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in all of that —
as those who are college professors and naturalists know. As this was
quite out of the question, he did the easiest thing — asked Mr. "Jenks of
Middleboro" to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz knew all
about his getting of them; and I say the strange and irritating thing is
that Agassiz did not think it worth while to tell us about it, a least in the
preface to his monumental work.

It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college pro-
fessor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.

"I was principal of an academy, during my younger years," he began,
"and was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly filled
the doorway of the room, smiled to the four corners of the room, and
called out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor Agassiz.

"Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it
to me across the room.

"Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would

34 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

I get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were laid?
Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did it only
once.

"When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew where I was going to
get them. I had got turt le eggs there before — at a particular patch of sandy
shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.

"Three hours was the limit. From the railroad station to Boston was
thirty-five miles; from tiie pond to the station was perhaps three or four
miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles. Forty miles
in round numbers! We figured it all out before he returned, and got the
trip down to two hours— record time: driving from the pond to the sta-
tion; from the station by express train to Boston; from Boston by cab to
Cambridge. This left an easy hour for accidents and delays.

"Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what
we didn't figure on was the turtle." And he paused abruptly.

"Young man," he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly
hiding the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, "young
man, when you go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! no!
That's bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle — and youth seldom
ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got those
turtle eggs to Agassiz.

"It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long
before there was any likelihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager for
the quest, and so fearful of failure that I started out to watch at the pond
fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles might be expected to
lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May 14.

"A little before dawn — along near three o'clock — I would drive over to
the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some thick
cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my kettle of sand
ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars I
would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season to open the
academy for the morning session.

"And so the watch began.

"I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept
to my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt
away they would stick up their heads through the quiet water; and as the
sun slanted down over the ragged rim of tree tops the slow things would
float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out and doze comfortably on
the hummocks and snags,

"What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and un-
breathed! The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 35

fields — of water lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste
them yet, and hear them yet — the still, large sounds of the waking day —
the pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping
anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the thought
of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare mornings!

"But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no
desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon the
sand as if she intended to help on the great professor's book. The em-
bryology of her eggs was of small concern to her; her contribution to the
Natural History of the United States could wait.

"And it did wait. I began my watch on the fourteenth of May; June first
found me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every morn-
ing, Sundays and rainy days alike. June first saw a perfect morning, but
every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg laying might be a matter strictly
of next year.

"I began to grow uneasy — not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns his
lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to fear lest, by
some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be known to the crea-
tures; that they might have gone to some other place to lay, while I was
away at the schoolroom.

"I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the second
week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning, and along
with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morning vigil.
Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the same clump of
cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning
mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my bones. But
Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those turtle eggs;
and I would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no use bringing a
china nest egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such delicate suggestion.

"Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little
after three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the
level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it any morning
before.

"This was the day: I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can
hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is
nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully believe, and I believe they can
be sharpened by cultivation. For a month I had been watching, brooding
over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse of things
that the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could the clods
and I.

"Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he too understood, I slipped eagerly

36 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel
ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his wake rose
the head of an enormous turtle. Swinging slowly around, the creature
headed straight for the shore, and without a pause scrambled out on the
sand.

"She was about the size of a big scoop shovel; but that was not what
excited me, so much as her manner, and the gait at which she moved; for
there was method in it, and fixed purpose. On she came, shuffling over the
sand toward the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined seesaw
that was taking her somewhere in particular, and that was bound to get
her there on time.

"I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic foot-
prints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the Mesozoic
mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when compared with
fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.

"But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a
narrow cow path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow
cow path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into the
high wet grass along the fence.

"I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a
trail of flattened grass a foot and a half wide. I wanted to stand up, — and I
don't believe I could have turned her back with a rail, — but I was afraid
if she saw me that she might return indefinitely to the pond; so on I
went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the lower rails of the fence,
as if the field beyond were a melon patch. It was nothing of the kind, only
a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very dis-
couraging. They were excessively wet vines and briery. I pulled my coat
sleeves as far over my fists as I could get them, and, with the tin pail of
sand swinging from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped fiercely,
but silently, on after the turtle.

"She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of this
dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove to,
warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me, at a clip
that was thrilling. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore down
across the corner of the pasture, across the powdery public road, and on to
a fence along a field of young corn.

"I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before,
wallowing through the deep dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a
large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn rows and saw the turtle
stop, and begin to paw about in the loose soft soil. She was going to lay!

"I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that place,

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 37

and the other place — the eternally feminine! But the place, evidently, was
hard to find. What could a female turtle do with a whole field of possible
nests to choose from? Then at last she found it, and, whirling about, she
backed quickly at it, and, tail first, began to bury herself before my staring
eyes.

"Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those
moments came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest,
most dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were
hours long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in
the sand alongshore. And how long would she stay there? And how
should I know if she had laid an egg?

"I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened
fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.

"Four o'clock! Why, there was no train until seven 1 No train for three
hours! The eggs would spoil! Then with a rush it came over me that this
was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven o'clock train — none
till after nine.

"I think I should have fainted had not the turtle just then begun
crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; but there, there in the sand, were the
eggs! And Agassiz! And the great book! And I cleared the fence, and the
forty miles that lay between me and Cambridge, at a single jump. He
should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should go to Agassiz by seven
o'clock, if I had to gallop every mile of the way. Forty miles! Any horse
could cover it in three hours, if he had to; and, upsetting the astonished
turtle, I scooped out her round white eggs.

"On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I laid them, with what
care my trembling fingers allowed; filled in between them with more
sand; so with another layer to the rim; and, covering all smoothly with
more sand, I ran back for my horse.

"That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtle had laid, and that he
was to get those eggs to Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the road
on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, doubling me up
before the dashboard, the pail of eggs miraculously lodged between my
knees.

"I let him out. If only he could keep this pace all the way to Cambridge!
Or even halfway there; and I should have time to finish the trip on foot.
I shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand, the pail of eggs
with the other, not daring to get off my knees, though the bang on them,
as we pounded down the wood road, was terrific. But nothing must
happen to the eggs; they must not be jarred, or even turned over in the
sand before they come tc? Agassiz.

38 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

"In order to get out on the pike it was necessary to drive back away
from Boston toward the town. We had nearly covered the distance, and
were rounding a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, ahead
of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the quick sharp whistle of a loco-
motive.

"What did it mean? Then followed the puff, pufff puff of a starting
train. But what train? Which way going? And, jumping to my feet for a
longer view, I pulled into a side road that paralleled the track, and headed
hard for the station.

"We reeled along. The station was still out of sight, but from behind the
bushes that shut it from view rose the smoke of a moving engine. It was
perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head-on, and, topping a
little hill, I swept down upon a freight train, the black smoke pouring
from the stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself together for its swift
run down the rails.

"My horse was on the gallop, going with the track, and straight toward
the coming train. The sight of it almost maddened me — the bare thought
of it, on the road to Boston! On I went; on it came, a half— a quarter of a
mile between us, when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced field
with only a level stretch of sod between me and the engine.

"With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, I swung him into the
field and sent him straight as an arrow for the track. That train should
carry me and my eggs to Boston!

"The engineer pulled the rope. He saw me standing up in the rig, saw
my hat blow off, saw me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my
teeth, and he jerked out a succession of sharp halts! But it was he who
should halt, not I; and on we went, the horse with a flounder landing the
carriage on top of the track.

"The train was already grinding to a stop; but before it was near a
stand-still I had backed off the track, jumped out, and, running down the
rails with the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung aboard the
cab.

"They offered no resistance; they hadn't had time. Nor did they have
the disposition, for I looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless, dew-
soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were a baby or a
bomb, a little tin pail of sand.

" 'Crazy,' the fireman muttered, looking to the engineer for his cue.

"I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy now.

"'Throw her wide open,' I commanded. 'Wide open! These are fresh
turtle eggs for Professor Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them before
breakfast.'

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 39

"Then they knew I was crazy, and, evidently thinking it best to humor
me, threw the throttle wide open, and away we went.

"I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing unconcernedly in the open field,
and gave a smile to my crew. That was all I could give them, and hold
myself and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. And they smiled
through their smut at me, though one of them held fast to his shovel,
while the other kept his hand upon a big ugly wrench. Neither of them
spoke to me, but above the roar of the swaying engine I caught enough of
their broken talk to understand that they were driving under a full head of
steam, with the intention of handing me over to the Boston police, as
perhaps the easiest way of disposing of me.

"I was only afraid that they would try it at the next station. But that
station whizzed past without a bit of slack, and the next, and the next;
when it came over me that this was the through freight, which should
have passed in the night, and was making up lost time.

"Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept me from shaking
hands with both men at this discovery. But I beamed at them; and they at
me. I was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet was wrinkling
my diaphragm with spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the
engineer, with a look that said, 'See the lunatic grin; he likes it!'

"He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me as they took the rails!
How the rushing wind in my ears sang to me! From my stand on the fire-
man's side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track just ahead of the
engine, where the ties seemed to leap into the throat of the mile-devouring
monster. The joy of it! Of seeing space swallowed by the mile!

"I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought of my horse, of
Agassiz, of the great book, of my great luck, — luck, — luck, — until the
multitudinous tongues of the thundering train were all chiming 'luck!
luck! luck!' They knew! They understood! This beast of fire and tireless
wheels was doing its very best to get the eggs to Agassiz!

"We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder flashed the morning
sun from the towering dome of the State House. I might have leaped from
the cab and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not caught the eye of
the engineer watching me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in
Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a train, and
forced it to carry me to Boston.

"Perhaps I had overdone my lunacy business. Suppose these two men
should take it into their heads to turn me over to the police, whether I
would or no? I could never explain the case in time to get the eggs to
Agassiz. I looked at my watch. There were still a few minutes left, in
which I might explain to these men, who, all at once, had become my

40 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

captors. But it was too late. Nothing could avail against my actions, my
appearance, and my little pail of sand.

"I had not thought of my appearance before. Here I was, face and
clothes caked with yellow mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone,
and in my full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been
digging all night with a tiny tin shovel on the shore! And thus to appear
in the decent streets of Boston of a Sunday morning!

"I began to feel like a hunted criminal. The situation was serious, or
might be, and rather desperately funny at its best. I must in some way
have shown my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.

"Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freight yard, the train slowed
down and came to a stop. I was ready to jump, but I had no chance. They
had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I looked at my watch
again. What time we had made! It was only six o'clock, with a whole hour
to get to Cambridge.

"But I didn't like this delay. Five minutes — ten — went by.

" 'Gentlemen,' I began, but was cut short by an express train coming
past. We were moving again, on — into a siding; on — on to the main
track; and on with a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes, run-
ning the length of the train; on at a turtle's pace, but on, when the fireman,
quickly jumping for the bell rope, left the way to the step free, and — the
chance had come!

"I never touched the step, but landed in the soft sand at the side of the
track, and made a line for the yard fence.

"There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my shoulder to see if they were
after me. Evidently their hands were full, and they didn't know I had
gone.

"But I had gone; and was ready to drop over the high board fence,
when it occurred to me that I might drop into a policeman's arms.
Hanging my pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously over — a
very wise thing to do before you jump a high board fence. There, crossing
the open square toward the station, was a big, burly fellow with a club —
looking for me.

"I flattened for a moment, when someone in the yard yelled at me. I
preferred the policeman, and, grabbing my pail, I slid over to the street.
The policeman moved on past the corner of the station out of sight. The
square was free, and yonder stood a cab!

"Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me
coming, and squared away. I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only
stared the more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 41

one dollar. I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged
into the cab, calling, 'Cambridge!'

"He would have taken me straight to the police station had I not said,
'Harvard College. Professor Agassiz's house! I've got eggs for Agassiz';
and pushed another dollar up at him through the hole.

"It was nearly half past six.

" 'Let him go!' I ordered. "Here's another dollar if you make Agassiz's
house in twenty minutes. Let him out; never mind the police!'

"He evidently knew the police, or there were none around at that time
on a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets as I had gone
down the wood roads from the pond two hours before, but with the rattle
and crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street,
we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out something in
Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and brass buttons.

"Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in jeopardy,
and on over the cobblestones, we went. Half standing, to lessen the jar, I
held the pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not daring to let
go even to look at my watch.

"But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near to
seven o'clock it might be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so close
was I running to the limit of my time.

"Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dived forward, ramming my head
into the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me
across the small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs
helter-skelter over the floor.

"We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house; and without taking time
to pick up the scattered eggs I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.

"No one was astir in the house. But I would stir them. And I did. Right
in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.

"'Agassiz,' I gasped, 'I want Professor Agassiz, quick!' And I pushed
by her into the hall.

" 'Go 'way, sir. I'll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go 'way,
sir!'

" 'Call him — Agassiz — instantly, or I'll call him myself.'

"But I didn't; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a great
white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick loud
voice called excitedly: —

" 'Let him in! Let him inl I know him. He has my turtle eggs!'

"And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic
gown, came sailing down the stairs,

42 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

"The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with
both hands, and, dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with a
swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my trembling
hands ticked its way to seven — as if nothing unusual were happening to
the history of the world."

"You were in time, then?" I said.

"To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of the
humble part I had in it."

79/0

The Aims and Methods of Science

THE METHODS OF ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE
ROGER BACON

ARE TWO METHODS IN WHICH WE ACQUIRE
-^ knowledge — argument and experiment. Argument allows us to
draw conclusions, and may cause us to admit the conclusion; but it
gives no proof, nor does it remove doubt, and cause the mind to rest
in the conscious possession of truth, unless the truth is discovered by
way of experience, e.g. if any man who had never seen fire were to
prove by satisfactory argument that fire burns and destroys things, the
hearer's mind would not rest satisfied, nor would he avoid fire; until by
putting his hand or some combustible thing into it, he proved by actual
experiment what the argument laid down; but after the experiment has
been made, his mind receives certainty and rests in the possession of
truth which could not be given by argument but only by experience.
And this is the case even in mathematics, where there is the strongest
demonstration. For let anyone have the clearest demonstration about an
equilateral triangle without experience of it, his mind will never lay

THE AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE 43

hold of the problem until he has actually before him the intersecting
circles and the lines drawn from the point of section to the extremities
of a straight line.

12/4-1294

ADDRESS BEFORE THE STUDENT BODY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

ALBERT EIN.STEIN

Y DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS:

I am glad to see you before me, a flourishing band of young people
who have chosen applied science as a profession.

I could sing a hymn of praise with the refrain of the splendid progress
in applied science that we have already made, and the enormous further
progress that you will bring about. We are indeed in the era and also
in the native land of applied science.

But it lies far from my thought to speak in this way. Much more, I am
reminded in this connection of the young man who had married a not
very attractive wife and was asked whether or not he was happy. He
answered thus: "If I wished to speak the truth, then I would have to
lie."

So it is with me. Just consider a quite uncivilized Indian, whether his
experience is less rich and happy than that of the average civilized
man. I hardly think so. There lies a deep meaning in the fact that the
children of all civilized countries are so fond of playing "Indians."

Why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and
makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer
runs — because we have not yet learned to make a sensible use of it.

In war, it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In
peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain. Instead of freeing us
in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men into
slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous
long day's work with disgust, and must continually tremble for their
poor rations.

You will be thinking that the old man sings an ugly song. I do it, how-
ever, with a good purpose, in order to point out a consequence.

44 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

It is not enough that you should understand about applied science
in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for man
himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical
endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization
cf labor and the distribution of goods — in order that the creations of our
mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this
in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

ICARUS IN SCIENCE
SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON

From Stars and Atoms

IN ANCIENT DAYS TWO AVIATORS PROCURED TO
themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air and
was duly honored on his landing. Icarus soared upwards to the sun till
the wax melted which bound his wings and his flight ended in fiasco.
In weighing their achievements, there is something to be said for
Icarus. The classical authorities tell us that he was only "doing a stunt,"
but I prefer to think of him as the man who brought to light a serious
constructional defect in the flying machines of his day. So, too, in science,
cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels confident they
will safely go; but by his excesses of caution their hidden weaknesses
remain undiscovered. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking
point till the weak points gape. For the mere adventure? Perhaps partly;
that is human nature. But if he is destined not yet to reach the sun and
solve finally the riddle of its constitution we may hope at least to
learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.

7927

THE AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE 45

BEQUEST TO THE ACADEMIC YOUTH OF HIS

COUNTRY

IVAN PAVLOV

SHALL I WISH FOR THE YOUNG STUDENTS OF

my country? First of all, sequence, consequence and again con-
sequence. In gaining knowledge you must accustom yourself to the
strictest sequence. You must be familiar with the very groundwork of
science before you try to climb the heights. Never start on the "next"
before you have mastered the "previous." Do not try to conceal the
shortcomings of your knowledge by guesses and hypotheses. Accustom
yourself to the roughest and simplest scientific tools. Perfect as the wing
of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by
the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them the man of science
can never rise. Without them your theories are vain surmises. But while
you are studying, observing, experimenting, do not remain content with
the surface of things. Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try
to penetrate the mystery of their origin. Seek obstinately for the laws that
govern them. And then—modesty. Never think you know all. Though
others may flatter you, retain the courage to say, "I am ignorant." Never
be proud. And lastly, science must be your passion. Remember that science
claims a man's whole life. Had he two lives they would not suuice.
Science demands an undivided allegiance from its followers. Li your
work and in your research there must always be passion.

THE SEARCH FOR UNITY
RAYMOND B. FOSDICK

THE BILL OF RIGHTS WILL OUTLAST MEIN KAMPF
just as the scientist's objective search for truth will outlive all the
regimented thinking of totalitarianism. Temporarily eclipsed, the proud

46 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIST

names of Paris, Strasbourg, Prague, Louvain, Warsaw, Leyden, as well
as Heidelberg and Leipsic and Berlin, will once again stand for the
quest for truth; once again will they be centers of candid and fearless
thinking—homes of the untrammeled and unafraid, where there is liberty
to learn, opportunity to teach and power to understand.

The task which faces all institutions concerned with the advance
of knowledge is not only to keep this faith alive but to make certain,
as far as they can, that the streams of culture and learning, wherever
they may be located or however feebly they may now flow, shall not
be blocked. . . .

... If we are to have a durable peace after the war, if out of the
Wreckage of the present, a new kind of cooperative life is to be built
on a global scale, the part that science and advancing knowledge will
play must not be overlooked. For although wars arid economic rivalries
may for longer or shorter periods isolate nations and split them up into
separate units, the process is never complete because the intellectual
life of the world, as far as science and learning are concerned, is definitely
internationalized, and whether we wish it or not an indelible pattern
of unity has been woven into the society of mankind.

There is not an area of activity in which this cannot be illustrated. An
American soldier, wounded on a battlefield in the Far East, owes his life
to the Japanese scientist, Kitasato, who isolated the bacillus of tetanus.
A Russian soldier, saved by a blood transfusion, is indebted to Land-
steiner, an Austrian. A German soldier is shielded from typhoid fever
with the help of a Russian, MetchnikofJ. A Dutch marine in the East
Indies is protected from malaria because of the experiments of an
Italian, Grassi; while a British aviator in North Africa escapes death
from surgical infection because a Frenchman, Pasteur, and a German,
Koch, elaborated a new technique.

In peace, as in war, we are all of us the beneficiaries of contributions
to knowledge made by every nation in the world. Our children are
guarded from diphtheria by what a Japanese and a German did, they
are protected from smallpox by an Englishman's work; they are saved
from rabies because of a Frenchman; they are cured of pellagra through
the researches of an Austrian. From birth to death, they are surrounded
by an invisible host — the spirits of men who never thought in terms of
flags or boundary lines and who never served a lesser loyalty than the
welfare of mankind. The best that every individual or group has
produced anywhere in the world has always been available to serve the
race of men, regardless of nation or color.

What is true of the medical sciences is true of the other sciences.

THE AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE 47

Whether it is mathematics or chemistry, whether it is bridges or auto-
mobiles or a new device for making cotton cloth or a cyclotron for
studying atomic structure, ideas cannot be hedged in behind geographical
barriers. Thought cannot be nationalized. The fundamental unity of
civilization is the unity of its intellectual life.

There is a real sense, therefore, in which the things that divide us are
trivial as compared with the things that unite us. The foundations of a
cooperative world have already been laid. It is not as if we were starting
from the beginning. For at least three hundred years, the process has
been at work, until today the cornerstones of society are the common
interests that relate to the welfare of all men everywhere.

In brief, the age of distinct human societies, indifferent to the fate of
one another, has passed forever; and the great task that will confront
us after the war is to develop for the community of nations new areas and
techniques of cooperative action which will fit the facts of our twentieth
century interdependence. We need rallying points of unity, centers around
which men of different cultures and faiths can combine, defined fields of
need, or goals of effort, in which by pooling its brains and resources, the
human race can add to its own well-being. Only as we begin to build,
brick by brick, in these areas of common interest where cooperation is
possible and the results are of benefit to all, can we erect the ultimate
structure of a united society.

A score of inviting areas for this kind of cooperation deserve explo-
ration. Means must be found by which the potential abundance of the
world can be translated into a more equitable standard of living. Mini-
mum standards of food, clothing and shelter should be established. The
new science of nutrition, slowly coming to maturity, should be expanded
on a world-wide scale. The science of agriculture needs development,
not only in our own climate but particularly in the tropic and sub-
tropic zones. With all their brilliant achievements, the medical sciences
are in their infancy. Public health stands at the threshold of new
possibilities. Physics and chemistry have scarcely started their contri-
butions to the happiness and comfort of human living. Economics and
political science are only now beginning to tell us in more confident
tones how to make this world a home to live in instead of a place to
fight and freeze and starve in.

1941

PART THREE

THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Synopsis

A. THE HEAVENS

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD OF MAY, FOUR HUNDRED YEARS
ago, Nicholas Copernicus received on his death bed the first copy of his im-
mortal book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (Concerning the Revo-
lutions of the Heavenly Bodies), in which he expressed his belief that the
earth moves around the sun. A few hours later he closed his eyes on a
medieval world that still believed in Ptolemy's geocentric universe.

Sixty-seven years later, in 1610, Galileo Galilei watched four small bodies
which appeared in the field of his telescope. Night after night he observed
them as they moved around the planet Jupiter. Here was a miniature solar
system similar to our own. Here was proof of the Copernican theory. Thus,
one of the greatest revolutions in the history of the human race took place.
Man was no longer the center of the world; he had assumed a subordinate
place in a larger universe.

In the following pages this story of Copernicus and Galileo is told in their
own words. As we read, some of the excitement and wonder which they
must have felt comes to us across the centuries.

Since that day, our knowledge of astronomy has greatly increased. We
know more about the planets; much more about the composition and even
the internal constitution of the stars; and we have discovered realms far be-
yond the range of Galileo's little telescope. This Orderly Universe extends
from OUT familiar satellite, the moon, to those exterior galaxies which are
visible only in the largest telescopes. To tell us about it, we chose Forest Ray
Moulton, who with T. C. Chamberlin is responsible for the modern theory
that the solar system was formed by the passage of a star near our own sun.
His description is an astronomical education in brief — a bird's-eye view ot
modern astronomy.

50 THE PHYSICAL WORLD

As man loolcs at the planets and shrinks in size before those distant gal-
axies, it is natural that he should ask Is There Life on Other Worlds? As
Sir James Jeans explains, science has its answer, based on facts of atmosphere,
temperature and mathematical ca/culation.

Life as we know it probably does not exist elsewhere in the solar system. It
may appear somewhere in our galaxy, or in some other galaxy outside the
Milky Way. We do not know, although we know much about these ex-
terior systems. In the field of external galaxies numerous recent develop-
ments have taken place. In The Milky Way and Beyond, Sir Arthur Edding-
ton, who is responsible for many of these developments, tells about them and
explains why he believes the universe is expanding. It is a fascinating hypoth-
esis, though there is disagreement among astronomers as to its correctness.
When the 2OO-inch telescope is finished, the problem may be solved.

B. THE EARTH

From outer space to A Young Man Looking at Rocks is a long jump to
more familiar ground. It is easier to contemplate the sculptured heart of a
fossil than the arms of a spiral nebula. Yet for that very reason, we are apt
to take the "commonest things" for granted. We forget that rocks, like
everything else, have a history. Old rocks hold the key to the age of the
earth; younger ones the clue to the origin of species. With Hugh Miller
we observe the history of the earth's crust spread before us, in massive blocks
of gneiss and hornblende and sedimentary beds of sandstone and shale. It is
charming autobiography from one of the classics of geology.

In the different types of rocks, Sir Archibald Geike can trace the story of
bygone ages. In the remarkable Geological Change, this famous nineteenth
century scientist describes the fundamentals of geology. He tells of the
rhythmic cycles caused by alternate erosion and uplifting of land. He tells of
the catastrophic changes which give rise to Earthquakes described by Father
Macelwane, or ferocious volcanic eruptions like that which doomed forty
thousand lives in St. Pierre, ironically saving the one man who was in /ail.

In the organic remains, the fossils, laid down in stratified rock, Geike
discerns forms now extinct — the ferns and conifers of which Peattie writes
in a later part; the scales of fishes found by Hugh Miller; the remains of
dinosaurs that once roamed the earth; even the fragments of prehistoric man,
the missing links about which you may read in Part Five.

Finally, like Paul B. Sears in Man, Maker of Wilderness, Geike watches
the effects of erosion on the land. Here is a clue to the decay of those civili-
zations which permit man to take everything from the earth, giving noth-
ing in return.

We have removed from Geological Change a section on the celebrated
nineteenth century controversy between the physicists and the geologists
about the age of the earth. The age set by the physicists, led by Lord Kelvin,
was far too short for the very slow and gradual changes the geologists

THE PHYSICAL WORLD 51

envisaged. That controversy was settled by the discovery of radium. It's dis-
integration furnished a source of energy the physicists had not taken into
their calculations. And its slow change into a unique type of lead within a
set period has furnished a valuable new geological clock. Examination of
radioactive substances in the oldest rocks now leads us to assign a period of
about 1,500,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 years as the age of the earth.

If we would understand the wind and the rain, we must know What
Makes the Weather. In aviation and agriculture and a thousand other activi-
ties, it is a problem of vital importance. In long range history, it may mean
climatic change that can alter the surface of a hemisphere. Here are the
modern theories about cold fronts and air masses. Here are the ideas which
help the weatherman become a successful prophet.

C. MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

In 1642, when Galileo died an old and disillusioned man, he had already
learned a great deal about the mathematical meaning of motion. But he still
did not understand why the planets moved around the sun. He could not
know that in that same year a baby would be born who would create a world
conforming to both mathematical and physical law.

On Christmas Day, 1642, Isaac Newton was born in the village of Wools-
thorpe in Lincolnshire, a premature, frail baby, the posthumous son of a
yoeman farmer. Despite expectations to the contrary, he lived, and became the
greatest scientist in history. He was to discover the law of gravitation, the
laws of motion, the principles of optics, the composite nature of light, and
with Leibnitz to invent the calculus. He of course owed a great debt to
Galileo and to two other astronomers who lived in this same extraordinary
period: Tycho Brahe, who first recorded accurately the motions of the plan-
ets; and Johann Kepler whose laws of planetary motion showed how these
planets moved with relation to their central sun. On the foundations laid by
these three, Newton built a conception of the world and the forces that
guide it that was destined to hold undisputed place until the beginning of
the twentieth century, and even at that distant date to undergo but minor
modification.

Newtoniana tells us something of the man; while Discoveries gives us all
too brief glimpses of the work that made him what he was.

The Physical Laws of the world are not easy to comprehend. Mathematics,
physics and chemistry are so bound up with mysterious symbolism, not diffi-
cult in itself but unintelligible to those who have not learned its secret,
that words cannot give their full meaning. Yet meaning they do have, even
for the layman. Much of it is conveyed in the selections that follow.

First, let us consider mathematics, the foundation of physical law, the
indispensable tool of the scientist. It transforms indefinite thoughts into
specific theories. With its advance has come the advance of civilization. In

52 THE PHYSICAL WORLD

remote ages primitive man learned to count; later to measure; finally to cal-
culate. So we come to the modern world of science, where man must be a
"calculating animal" if he is to understand physical and even biological
science. Hogben tells something of the story in Mathematics, the Mirror of
Civilization.

From mathematics we turn to physics. But before we do so, let us consider
the Experiments and Ideas of that protean American Ben Franklin. He is
best known for his work with electricity, with kites and lightning rods. Few
remember his bifocal glasses, his discovery of the origin of northeast storms,
his extraordinary prophecy of aerial invasion.

In physics, we run squarely against one of the fundamental scientific prob-
lems of the century: what goes on inside the atom? In Exploring the Atom,
Sir James Jeans describes this strange world which all of us have heard about
yet few understand. He shows how our nineteenth century concept of the
atom as a sort of indestructible brick has been changed completely; he
makes the new picture of the atom really clear. And in doing so, he gives us
the basic knowledge which we must have to understand atomic fission and
the atomic bomb.

E. O. Lawrence, the California scientist who developed the world-famous
cyclotron, has become one of the leaders in research on atomic fission. Long
before our entrance into the war, his famous machine had "smashed the
atom/' In Touring the Atomic World, Henry Schacht gives a description of
his technique which the layman can understand. Not so long after this
article was written, wartime secrecy shrouded the work of Lawrence and
other nuclear physicists. The veil was lifted when a bomb exploded over
Hiroshima. It is interesting to note how much research went into the subject,
long before its military implications were thought of.

The first clue to the breaking up of the atomic nucleus was given by those
radioactive substances which disintegrate spontaneously. Jeans and Schacht
have told us something about them; and now we come to the work of that
extraordinary woman, Marie Curie, who kept house, brought up a family,
and discovered radium. The Discovery of Radium is a story which gains new
meaning when it is related to the course of modern physics.

It is impossible to think of the question of matter apart from the equally
fundamental one of energy. "Almost every problem of living turns out in the
last analysis to be a problem of the control of energy/' writes George Russell
Harrison of M. I. T. In The Taming of Energy, he tells us something of how
the various forms are interrelated. The question is complicated by Einstein,
who says that matter and energy are related according to mathematical law.
That relationship is deep water indeed, as is all relativity theory. Yet in Space,
Time and Einstein, Dr. Heyl, the man who weighed the earth, says interest-
ing things about relativity which are not too difficult for the informed lay-
man.

THE PHYSICAL WORLD 53

As physics and chemistry continue to advance, it becomes harder to decide
where one begins and the other ends. In the eighteenth century when
Lavoisier, "Father of Modern Chemistry/' died on the guillotine because the
French Revolution had "no need for scientists/' there was little connection.
In the nineteenth, when Mendeteef set up his periodic table, the gulf re-
mained. Basic work dealt with discovering and arranging the elements. In
the periodic table, Mendeteef arranged the elements according to their atomic
weights in somewhat the same way that the days of the month are arranged
on a calendar. When this was done, the elements in any vertical column
(the Sundays or Fridays) resembled one another in basic chemical properties.
As many elements had not been discovered, it was necessary to leave gaps in
the table. He prophesied that some day these gaps would be filled by ele-
ments which were then unknown, and this is exactly what has happened.

There is another aspect of chemistry which is perhaps of greater interest
to the lay reader — its application to everyday life. On chemical reactions
depend practically all industrial processes of the present day. On the re-
arrangement of atoms and molecules of substances which occur in nature,
depends the creation of the synthetics which are becoming an inseparable
part of our lives. One subject is discussed by the director of the Du Pont
laboratories in The Foundations of Chemical Industry; the other by the
Science Editor of the New York Times in The Chemical Revolution.

Finally comes the all-absorbing question of the war. Many weapons of
scientific warfare are held in greatest secrecy by various powers. But many
others can be discussed because they are known to all.

In Jets Power Future Flying, Watson Davis, the Director of Science
Service, the country's leading organization for the general dissemination of
scientific information, describes the various techniques whereby jet propul-
sion is revolutionizing aviation. In Science in War and After, Dr. Harrison
tells us about tanks that are tougher, aerial photography that sees farther,
naval guns that shoot straighter, and radio locators that see where human
eyes are useless.

A. THE HEAVENS

A Theory that the Earth Moves Around the Sun

NICHOLAS COPERNICUS

From Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies

THAT THE UNIVERSE IS SPHERICAL

THIRST OF ALL WE ASSERT THAT THE UNIVERSE IS

JL spherical; partly because this form, being a complete whole, needing
no joints, is the most perfect of all; partly because it constitutes the most
spacious form, which is thus best suited to contain and retain all things;
or also because all discrete parts of the world, I mean the sun, the moon
and the planets, appear as spheres; or because all things tend to assume
the spherical shape, a fact which appears in a drop of water and in other
fluid bodies when they seek of their own accord to limit themselves.
Therefore no one will doubt that this form is natural for the heavenly
bodies.

THAT THE EARTH IS LIKEWISE SPHERICAL

That the earth is likewise spherical is beyond doubt, because it presses
from all sides to its center. Although a perfect sphere is not immediately
recognized because of the great height of the mountains and the depres-
sion of the valleys, yet this in no wise invalidates the general spherical
form of the earth. This becomes clear in the following manner: To
people who travel from any place to the North, the north pole of the
daily revolution rises gradually, while the south pole sinks a like amount.
Most of the stars in the neighborhood of the Great Bear appear not to
set, and in the South some stars appear no longer to rise. Thus Italy
does not see Canopus, which is visible to the Egyptians. And Italy sees
the outermost star of the River, which is unknown to us of a colder zone.
On the other hand, to people who travel toward the South, these stars
rise higher in the heavens, while those stars which are higher to us

THE EARTH MOVES AROUND THE SUN 55

become lower. Therefore, it is plain that the earth is included between
the poles and is spherical. Let us add that the inhabitants of the East do
not see the solar and lunar eclipses that occur in the evening, and people
who live in the West do not see eclipses that occur in the morning, while
those living in between see the former later, and the latter earlier.

That even the water has the same shape is observed on ships, in that
the land which can not be seen from the ship can be spied from the tip
of the mast. And, conversely, when a light is put on the tip of the mast,
it appears to observers on land gradually to drop as the ship recedes until
the light disappears, seeming to sink in the water. It is clear that the
water, too, in accordance with its fluid nature, is drawn downwards, just
as is the earth, and its level at the shore is no higher than its convexity
allows. The land therefore projects everywhere only as far above the
ocean as the land accidentally happens to be higher. . . .

WHETHER THE EARTH HAS A CIRCULAR MOTION, AND CONCERNING
THE LOCATION OF THE EARTH

Since it has already been proved that the earth has the shape of a
sphere, I insist that we must investigate whether from its form can be
deduced a motion, and what place the earth occupies in the universe.
Without this knowledge no certain computation can be made for the
phenomena occurring in the heavens. To be sure, the great majority of
writers agree that the earth is at rest in the center of the universe, so that
they consider it unbelievable and even ridiculous to suppose the contrary.
Yet, when one weighs the matter carefully, he will see that this question
is not yet disposed of, and for that reason is by no means to be considered
unimportant. Every change of position which is observed is due either
to the motion of the observed object or of the observer, or to motions,
naturally in different directions, of both; for when the observed object
and the observer move in the same manner and in the same direction,
then no motion is observed. Now the earth is the place from which we
observe the revolution of the heavens and where it is displayed to our
eyes. Therefore, if the earth should possess any motion, the latter would
be noticeable in everything that is situated outside of it, but in the
opposite direction, just as if everything were traveling past the earth.
And of this nature is, above all, the daily revolution. For this motion
seems to embrace the whole world, in fact, everything that is outside of
the earth, with the single exception of the earth itself. But if one should
admit that the heavens possess none of this motion, but that the earth
rotates from west to east; and if one should consider this seriously with
respect to the seeming rising and setting of the sun, of the moon and

56 THE HEAVENS

the stars; then one would find that it is actually true. Since the heavens
which contain and retain all things are the common home of all things,
it is not at once comprehensible why a motion is not rather ascribed to
the thing contained than to the containing, to the located rather than to
the locating. This opinion was actually held by the Pythagoreans Heraklid
and Ekphantus and the Syracusean Nicetas (as told by Cicero), in that
they assumed the earth to be rotating in the center of the universe. They
were indeed of the opinion that the stars set due to the intervening of
the earth, and rose due to its receding. . . .

REFUTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS, AND THEIR INSUFFICIENCY

It is claimed that the earth is at rest in the center of the universe and
that this is undoubtedly true. But one who believes that the earth rotates
will also certainly be of the opinion that this motion is natural and not
violent. Whatever is in accordance with nature produces effects which
are the opposite of what happens through violence. Things upon wrhich
violence or an external force is exerted must become annihilated and
cannot long exist. But whatever happens in the course of nature remains
in good condition and in its best arrangement. Without cause, therefore,
Ptolemy feared that the earth and all earthly things if set in rotation
would be dissolved by the action of nature, for the functioning of nature
is something entirely different from artifice, or from that which could
be contrived by the human mind. But why did he not fear the same, and
indeed in much higher degree, for the universe, whose motion would
have to be as much more rapid as the heavens are larger than the earth?
Or have the heavens become infinite just because they have been removed
from the center by the inexpressible force of the motion; while otherwise,
if they were at rest, they would collapse? Certainly if this argument
were true the extent of the heavens would become infinite. For the more
they were driven aloft by the outward impulse of the motion, the more
rapid would the motion become because of the ever increasing circle
which it would have to describe in the space of 24 hours; and, con-
versely, if the motion increased, the immensity of the heavens would also
increase. Thus velocity would augment size into infinity, and size,
velocity. But according to the physical law that the infinite can neither
be traversed, nor can it for any reason have motion, the heavens would,
however, of necessity be at rest.

But it is said that outside of the heavens there is no body, nor place,
nor empty space, in fact, that nothing at all exists, and that, therefore,
there is no space in which the heavens could expand; then it is really
strange that something could be enclosed by nothing. If, however, the
heavens were infinite and were bounded only by their inner concavity,

THE EARTH MOVES AROUND THE SUN 57

then we have, perhaps, even better confirmation that there is nothing
outside of the heavens, because everything, whatever its size, is within
them; but then the heavens would remain motionless. The most impor-
tant argument, on which depends the proof of the finiteness of the
universe, is motion. Now, whether the world is finite or infinite, we will
leave to the quarrels of the natural philosophers; for us remains the
certainty that the earth, contained between poles, is bounded by a spher-
ical surface. Why should we hesitate to grant it a motion, natural and
corresponding to its form; rather than assume that the whole world,
whose boundary is not known and cannot be known, moves? And why
are we not willing to acknowledge that the appearance of a daily revolu-
tion belongs to the heavens, its actuality to the earth? The relation is
similar to that of which Virgil's /Eneas says: "We sail out of the harbor,
and the countries and cities recede." For when a ship is sailing along
quietly, everything which is outside of it will appear to those on board
to have a motion corresponding to the movement of the ship, and the
voyagers are of the erroneous opinion that they with all that they have
with them are at rest. This can without doubt also apply to the motion
of the earth, and it may appear as if the whole universe were revolving

CONCERNING THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

. . . Since nothing stands in the way of the movability of the earth,
I believe we must now investigate whether it also has several motions,
so that it can be considered one of the planets. That it is not the center
of all the revolutions is proved by the irregular motions of the planets,
and their varying distances from the earth, which cannot be explained
as concentric circles with the earth at the center. Therefore, since there
are several central points, no one will without cause be uncertain
whether the center of the universe is the center of gravity of the earth
or some other central point. I, at least, am of the opinion that gravity
is nothing else than a natural force planted by the divine providence of
the Master of the World into its parts, by means of which they, assuming
a spherical shape, form a unity and a whole. And it is to be assumed that
the impulse is also inherent in the sun and the moon and the other
planets, and that by the operation of this force they remain in the spherical
shape in which they appear; while they, nevertheless, complete their
revolutions in diverse ways. If then the earth, too, possesses other motions
besides that around its center, then they must be of such a character as
to become apparent in many ways and in appropriate manners; and
among such possible effects we recognize the yearly revolution.

*543

Proof that the Earth Moves

GALILEO GALILEI

From The Sidereal Messenger

A BOUT TEN MONTHS AGO A REPORT REACHED MY
<L\. ears that a Dutchman had constructed a telescope, by the aid of
which visible objects, although at a great distance from the eye of the
observer, were seen distinctly as if near; and some proofs of its most
wonderful performances were reported, which some gave credence to,
but others contradicted. A few days after, I received confirmation of the
report in a letter written from Paris by a noble Frenchman, Jaques
Badovere, which finally determined me to give myself up first to inquire
into the principle of the telescope, and then to consider the means by
which I might compass the invention of a similar instrument, which
after a little while I succeeded in doing, through deep study of the theory
of Refraction; and I prepared a tube, at first of lead, in the ends of
which I fitted two glass lenses, both plane on one side, but on the other
side one spherically convex, and the other concave. Then bringing my
eye to the concave lens I saw objects satisfactorily large and near, for
they appeared one-third of the distance off. and nine times larger than
when they are seen with the natural eye alone. I shortly afterwards con-
structed another telescope with more nicety, which magnified objects
more than sixty times. At length, by sparing neither labour nor expense,
I succeeded in constructing for myself an instrument so superior that
objects seen through it appear magnified nearly a thousand times, and
more than thirty times nearer than if viewed by the natural powers of
sight alone.

FIRST TELESCOPIC OBSERVATIONS

It would be altogether a waste of time to enumerate the number and
importance of the benefits which this instrument may be expected to

PROOF THAT THE EARTH MOVES 59

confer, when used by land or sea. But without paying attention to its
use for terrestrial objects, I betook myself to observations of the heavenly
bodies; and first of all, I viewed the Moon as near as if it was scarcely
two semidiameters of the Earth distant. After the Moon, I frequently
observed other heavenly bodies, both fixed stars and planets, with
incredible delight. . . .

DISCOVERY OF JUPITER'S SATELLITES

There remains the matter, which seems to me to deserve to be con-
sidered the most important in this work, namely, that I should disclose
and publish to the world the occasion of discovering and observing four
planets, never seen from the very beginning of the world up to our own
times, their positions, and the observations made during the last two
months about their movements and their changes* of magnitude. . . .

On the yth day of January in the present year, 1610, in the first hour
of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the
heavens through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my
view, and as I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I
noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before,
owing to want of power in my other telescope, namely,, that three little
stars, small but very bright, were near the planet; and although I
believed them to belong to the number of the fixed stars, yet they made
me somewhat wonder, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a
straight line, parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest
of the stars, equal to them in magnitude. The position of them with
reference to one another and to Jupiter was as follows:

Ori. * * O * Occ.

On the east side there were two stars, and a single one towards the west.
The star which was furthest towards the east, and the western star,
appeared rather larger than the third.

I scarcely troubled at all about the distance between them and Jupiter,
for, as I have already said, at first I believed them to be fixed stars; but
when on January 8th, led by some fatality, I turned again to look at
the same part of the heavens, I found a very different state of things,
for there were three little stars all west of Jupiter, and nearer together
than on the previous night, and they were separated from one another
by equal intervals, as the accompanying figure shows.

60 THE HEAVENS

Ori. O * * * Occ.

At this point, although I had not turned my thoughts at all upon the
approximation of the stars to one another, yet my surprise began to be
excited, how Jupiter could one day be found to the east of all the afore-
said fixed stars when the day before it had been west of two of them;
and forthwith I became afraid lest the planet might have moved differ-
ently from the calculation of astronomers, and so had passed those stars
by its own proper motion. I, therefore, waited for the next night with the
most intense longing, but I was disappointed of my hope, for the sky
was covered with clouds in every direction.

But on January loth the stars appeared in the following position with
regard to Jupiter, the third, as I thought, being

Ori. * * O Occ.

hidden by the planet. They were situated just as before, exactly in the
same straight line with Jupiter, and along the Zodiac.

When I had seen these phenomena, as I knew that corresponding
changes of position could not by any means belong to Jupiter, and as,
moreover, I perceived that the stars which I saw had always been the
same, for there were no others either in front or behind, within a great
distance, along the Zodiac — at length, changing from doubt into surprise,
I discovered that the interchange of position which I saw belonged not to
Jupiter, but to the stars to which my attention had been drawn, and I
thought therefore that they ought to be observed henceforward with
more attention and precision.

Accordingly, on January nth I saw an arrangement of the follow-
ing kind:

Ori. * * O Occ.

namely, only two stars to the east of Jupiter, the nearer of which was dis-
tant from Jupiter three times as far as from the star further to the east;
and the star furthest to the east was nearly twice as large as the other
one; whereas on the previous night they had appeared nearly of equal
magnitude. I, therefore, concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there
are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and
Mercury round the Sun; which at length was established as clear as
daylight by numerous other subsequent observations. These observations

PROOF THAT THE EARTH MOVES 61

also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal
bodies performing their revolutions round Jupiter. . . .

These are my observations upon the four Medicean planets, recently
discovered for the first time by me; and although it is not yet permitted
me to deduce by calculation from these observations the orbits of these
bodies, yet I may be allowed to make some statements, based upon them,
well worthy of attention.

ORBITS AND PERIODS OF JUPITER's SATELLITES

And, in the first place, since they are sometimes behind, sometimes
before Jupiter, at like distances, and withdraw from this planet towards
the east and towards the west only within very narrow limits of
divergence, and since they accompany this planet alike when its motion
is retrograde and direct, it can be a matter of doubt to no one that they
perform their revolutions about this planet while at the same time they
all accomplish together orbits of twelve years' length about the centre
of the world. Moreover, they revolve in unequal circles, which is evi-
dently the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that I have never been
permitted to see two satellites in conjunction when their distance from
Jupiter was great, ^whereas near Jupiter two, three, and sometimes all
four, have been found closely packed together. Moreover, it may be
detected that the revolutions of the satellites which describe the smallest
circles round Jupiter are the most rapid, for the satellites nearest to
Jupiter are often to be seen in the east, when the day before they have
appeared in the west, and contrariwise. Also, the satellite moving in the
greatest orbit seems to me, after carefully weighing the occasions of its
returning to positions previously noticed, to have a periodic time of half
a month. Besides, we have a notable and splendid argument to remove
the scruples of those who can tolerate the revolution of the planets
round the Sun in the Copernican system, yet are so disturbed by the
motion of one Moon about the Earth, while both accomplish an orbit
of a year's length about the Sun, that they consider that this theory of
the universe must be upset as impossible; for now we have not one
planet only revolving about another, while both traverse a vast orbit
about the Sun, but our sense of sight presents to us four satellites circling
about Jupiter, like the Moon about the Earth, while the whole system
travels over a mighty orbit about the Sun in the space of twelve years.

1610

The Orderly Universe

FOREST RAY MOULTON

iN THE CLEAR VAULT OF THE HEAVENS MANY
shining objects are seen — the sun by day, the moon and numerous
stars at night. In comparison with the enormous earth beneath our feet,
they all appear to be insignificant bodies. Indeed, the sun and the moon
are often hidden from our view by a passing cloud, while the stars are
only scintillating points of light. Not only do the heavenly bodies appear
to be relatively small, but men in all ages almost down to our own have
believed that they are small. The general conception of the relative impor-
tance of the various bodies in the cosmos is illustrated by the story of
creation in Genesis. According to this account, after the earth had been
created, "God made two great lights" in the sky above, "the greater light
to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." And then, almost
as if it were an afterthought, "he made the stars also."

Often in the history of science it has been found that "things are not
what they seem." It has been so in the history of astronomy to a marked
degree. Perhaps in no other field of exploration have the differences
between appearances and realities been so great. On the one hand, this
apparently limitless planet on which we dwell has been reduced relatively
to a particle of dust floating in the immensity of space; while, on the
other hand, "the greater light," hanging like a lamp in the sky, has been
expanded to a flaming mass of gas a million times greater in volume than
the earth. More remarkable still, the tiny twinkling stars, instead of being
fireflies of the heavens, are in reality other suns, many greater than our
own, whose glories are dimmed only by their enormous distances from
us; and the soft circle of light which we know as the Milky Way has
been found to be a vast cosmic system of twenty thousand million stars.

Amazing are the differences between what the heavenly bodies appear
to be and what they actually are. Equally amazing are the differences
between the intervals of time within the range of direct human experience

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 63

and the enormous periods covered by the cosmic processes. Historians
speak of the civilizations which long ago flourished in the valleys of the
Nile and the Euphrates as being ancient, and from the standpoint of
human history they are ancient. Yet all the written records which arche-
ologists have recovered from the buried ruins of long-forgotten cities
date back less than ten thousand years, which is only a moment in com-
parison with the millions of years of the geological eras or with the three
thousand million years during which the earth has existed as a separate
body. Even the great age of the earth is only a small fraction of the
enormous lifetime of a star.

Great distances, prodigious masses, and long intervals of time are not
merely interesting. They stir our imaginations, exercise our reasoning
powers, expand our spirits, and change our perspective with respect to
all the experiences of life. But they do not include all the important conse-
quences of astronomical investigations. Indeed, they do not directly
include that which is most important, the supreme discovery of science —
the orderliness of the universe.

What do we mean by "the orderliness of the universe"? Astronomers
found from painstaking and long-continued observations of the heavenly
bodies that celestial phenomena recur in regular sequences. Though the
order of the succession of events in the heavens is often somewhat com-
plex, it is nevertheless systematic and invariable. The running of no clock
ever approached in precision the motions of the sun, the moon, and the
stars. In fact, to this day clocks are corrected and regulated by comparing
them with the apparent diurnal motions of the heavenly bodies. Since not
merely a few but hundreds of celestial phenomena were long ago found
to be perfectly orderly, it was gradually perceived that majestic order
prevails universally in those regions in which, before the birth of science,
capricious gods and goddesses were believed to hold dominion. . . .

THE MOON

For a few days each month the crescent moon may be seen after sunset
in the western sky. In a week it changes to a semicircle of light directly
south on the meridian at the same hour; in another week, at the full
phase, it rises in the east as the sun sets. If observations are continued
through the night, the full moon is found directly south at midnight, and
setting in the west as the sun rises. Year after year and century after
century this shining body goes through its cycles of changes, each cycle
being generally similar to the others but no two of them being exactly
alike. It is not surprising that primitive peoples should have regarded it
with awe and determined the times of their religious ceremonies by its

64 THE HEAVENS

phases. Indeed, most of the calendars of antiquity were based upon the
phases of the moon.

Regularities in the motions of the moon and in the succession of its
phases have always been found by those who have carefully followed
celestial phenomena. But these approximations to cyclical repetitions are
only crude hints of the perfect orderliness which accurate and long-
continued astronomical observations have proved to exist. Every apparent
departure from some simple theory has been found to be a part of a
greater and more complicated order. The observed motion of the moon
is compounded out of more than a thousand cycles whose magnitudes
and phases are now accurately known. The theory of the motion of the
moon is so perfect that its position can be computed for any instant in
the future, even for a thousand years. Indeed, it is obvious that if it were
not possible for mathematicians to compute accurately the motions of the
moon, they could not unerringly predict all the circumstances of eclipses
many years in advance of their occurrence.

Astronomers have not simply worked out the properties of the motion
of the moon from observations of its positions over long intervals of time.
They have discovered the underlying reason for all the complexities of its
path about the earth, and that reason is that it moves subject to the
gravitational attraction of the earth and, to a lesser degree, of the more
distant sun. This force which prevents the moon from flying away from
the earth is sufficient to break a steel cable nearly three 'hundred miles
in diameter. Yet invisibly, like the force between a magnet and a piece of
iron, it acts across the 240,000 miles between the earth and the moon.
With extraordinary exactness it varies inversely as the square of the
distance between these bodies. Together with the attraction of the sun
on the earth and the moon, it forms an infallible basis for explaining all
the peculiarities of the motion of our satellite. Indeed, in numerous
instances it has enabled mathematicians to anticipate experience and to
predict phenomena which observations later confirmed.

Mere words cannot do justice to the marvelous agreement between
theory and the actual motions of the moon. No machine ever ran with
such accuracy; no predictions of terrestrial phenomena were ever so per-
fectly fulfilled. If we are entitled to conclude that we understand any-
thing whatever, we may claim that we understand how the moon moves
around the earth under the attractions of the earth and the sun. . . .

Evidently the moon is above the level of the highest clouds and far
away from the earth. It is easy to understand that if two astronomers are
at two different points, they will see the moon in somewhat different
directions from their points of observation: and it is almost as easy to

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 65

understand that from the distance between the astronomers and the
angle at which the moon is observed its altitude above the earth can
be computed. From such observations and calculations, astronomers have
found that the distance from the center of the earth to the center of the
moon varies between 225,000 and 252,000 miles, with an average of 238,857
miles. This distance is known with nearly the same percentage of accuracy
as the diameter of the earth. The moon moves at an average speed of
3,350 feet per second in an orbit so large that in going this distance it
deviates from a straight line only about one twentieth of an inch.

After the distance to the moon has been determined, its diameter can
be computed from its apparent size. This shining object which even a
small button held at arm's length will hide from view is actually 2,160
miles in diameter, or more than one fourth the diameter of the earth.
Its exterior area is approximately thirty million square miles, or ten
times the area of the United States. Consequently, there is abundant room
on its surface for mountains and valleys and plains and lakes and seas.
There are, indeed, many mountains on the moon's surface, both isolated
peaks and long ranges, and there are valleys and plains, but no lakes or
seas. In fact, there is no water whatever upon its surface, nor is there even
an atmosphere surrounding it.

There is no real mystery respecting the lack of air and water on the
moon. The surface gravity of this small world (about one sixth that of
the earth) is not sufficient to hold the swiftly darting molecules of an
atmosphere from escaping away into space. Its surface is a desert, unpro-
tected by clouds or an atmosphere from the burning rays of the sun
during its day, or from the rapid escape of heat during its night. Both
extremes of its surface temperature are particularly severe, because its
period of rotation is about 29.5 times that of the earth. For nearly fifteen
of our days a point on its surface is subjected to a temperature above the
boiling point of water on the earth; for an equal interval of time it freezes
in a temperature which descends far toward the absolute zero (about
—460° Fahrenheit), Evidently it cannot be the abode of life. . . .

THE PLANETS

From a certain point of view the earth is for us a very important body,
more important than every celestial body except the sun. It has been the
home of the life stream of which we are a part for more than a thousand
million years. It will be the home of our successors until our race becomes
extinct. Our very existence depends upon it.

From another point of view, which we shall now take, the earth is not
very important. It is only one of nine known planets which revolve

66 THE HEAVENS

around the sun, each of them held in its orbit by the attraction of the
great central mass. Thus, the very brilliant silvery object which we see
in the western evening sky (and eastern morning sky) every nineteen
months is the planet Venus, a world in size and in most other respects
similar to our earth. The wandering conspicuous red body which appears
in the evening sky every twenty-six months is the planet Mars, and the
brighter yellowish object which returns every thirteen months is Jupiter.
These bodies and two others, Mercury and Saturn, were called planets
(or wanderers) by the ancients because they are constantly moving with
respect to the stars. . . .

It was not until the first decades of the seventeenth century that Kepler
worked out from the observations of Tycho Brahe the properties of the
planetary orbits; it was not until the latter part of the same century that
Newton proved the law of gravitation and explained by means of it the
motions of the planets and of the moon, the oblateness of the earth, and
the ebb and flow of the tides. These great achievements mark the closing
of an epoch in the history of the thought of the world and the beginning
of a new, for they entirely overthrew earlier views respecting the nature
of the cosmos and established others which were entirely different. They
permanently removed man from his proud position at the center of crea-
tion and placed him on a relatively insignificant body; but, as a compen-
sation, they rescued him from a universe of chance and superstition and
gave him one of unfailing and majestic orderliness.

There have been many impressive illustrations of the orderliness of
the universe and of our understanding of that order, but none has been
more dramatic than the discovery of Neptune. This remarkable story
opened in 1781 with the discovery of the planet Uranus (the first one
discovered in historic times) by William Herschel; it closed with the
discovery of Neptune in 1846.

After Uranus had been observed for a few months, mathematicians
computed its orbit and directed observers where to point their telescopes
in order to see this planet, for it is too faint to be observable with the
unaided eye. For nearly forty years Uranus was always found precisely
where the mathematicians said it would be seen. Then there began to be
an appreciable difference between theory and the observations. By 1830
the discrepancies had become serious; by 1840 they were intolerably large.
Although the discrepancies were intolerably large to scientists they would
have been negligible to anyone else in the world. During the sixty years
following the discovery of Uranus it did not depart from its predicted
positions by an amount large enough to be observable without the aid
of a telescope. Since mankind had never even known of the existence

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 67

of Uranus until 1781, it at first seems absurd that scientists should have
been disturbed by very minute unexplained peculiarities in its motions —
variations from theory so slight that they were not observable until the
lapse of about forty years. The theories, however, were believed to be
very perfect. Hence the discrepancies called into question their exactness,
or perhaps even the soundness of mathematical reasoning. In fact, the
unexplained difference between theory and observation threw a doubt
on our ability to discover and to apply the laws of nature. For this reason
the motion of Uranus became one of the most important problems in
science.

In 1846 order was restored by a brilliant discovery. Some years earlier
it had been suggested that Uranus was departing slightly from its pre-
dicted orbit as the consequence of the attraction of an unknown world. The
problem was to find the unknown body from its minute effects on Uranus.
No brief statement can give any adequate realization of the difficulties
of the problem. The leading mathematicians of the time thought it could
not be solved. But two young men, J. C. Adams, of England, and U. J.
Leverrier, of France, inspired with the optimism and energy of youth,
calculated where the unknown world would be found. Their predictions
were brilliantly fulfilled by the discovery of Neptune on February 23,
1846, by J. G. Galle, a young German astronomer. With this discovery,
the motion of Uranus again was fully explained, the laws of nature and
our reasoning powers were no longer in question, and the universe was
once more orderly. . . .

No experiences give us a better understanding of distances than those
obtained from long journeys. Consequently, let us in imagination board
some miraculous skyship, of which everyone has often dreamed, and
travel from the sun to the various planets.

Obviously our skyship must fly rapidly or we shall not live long enough
to cross the great distance from one planet to another. On the other hand,
if it travels at too great speed we shall not be able to descend safely upon
the surface of a planet. So let us suppose our skyship can traverse the
interplanetary spaces at the rate of a thousand miles per hour, a speed of
travel at which one might eat breakfast in the eastern part of the United
States and luncheon in Europe. Let us start from the surface of the sun.
Perhaps before directing our way toward Mercury we should circle around
this great center of attraction. Jauntily we set out and travel continuously,
but we do not complete the circuit of the sun and get back to our point
of departure until 113 days, or nearly four months, have elapsed.

With some trepidation at leaving the sun and plunging into the inter-
planetary spaces, we depart for Mercury, which we reach in four years and

68 THE HEAVENS

one month. In three and one half years we are at the distance of Venus;
in three more at the orbit of the earth, ten years and seven months after
we left the sun. Since five years and seven months more are required to
reach Mars from the orbit of the earth, it takes our skyship sixteen years
and two months to fly from the sun to this planet. Obviously the intervals
of time required for these sky voyages are so great that they fail to give us
any real understanding of the enormous distances we traverse. Yet let us
continue* on our way.

We arrive at Jupiter in fifty-five years after we left the sun; at Saturn in
lor years; at Uranus in 203 years; and at Neptune in 318 years. If we
should continue to distant and inconspicuous Pluto, we should arrive there
in 420 years. And yet at the rate of our travel we could eat breakfast in
New York, luncheon in London, and return to New York for dinner anc
the theater. . . .

COMETS

Since the* dawn of history and, indeed, for millions of years before the
origin of man, the sun and the moon have not changed appreciably in
appearance. But there are celestial visitors, the comets, which do not
possess these qualities of permanence and uniformity from which the
orderliness of the universe was first perceived. These objects often come
quite unexpectedly out of the depths of space for a brief visit to the inte-
rior of the solar system, and then they recede back into the night from
which they came. They are not of fixed shape or constant dimensions like
the planets. The typical comet consists of a small nucleus, generally star-
like in appearance, surrounded by a vast gaseous envelope which varies
enormously in volume, sometimes being as large as the sun; while from its
head there streams out a tail, perhaps fifty millions of miles in length,
which in exceptional cases appears to reach a third of the way across the
sky.

It is not strange that primitive peoples and, indeed, all men until only
two or three centuries ago regarded comets with superstitious fear. Our
predecessors believed that these bizarre-appearing objects are malignant
spirits prowling through our atmosphere, or at least that they are portents
of wars and pestilences. After centuries of belief in these superstitions,
accepted alike by the ignorant and the learned, by theologians and
scientists, observations led finally to the truth.

Tycho Brahe (1571-1630), the greatest and last observer before the inven^
tion of the telescope, comparing the different apparent directions of the
comet of 1577 as seen simultaneously from various places in Europe,
proved that this terrifying object was far beyond our atmosphere and at

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 69

least as distant as the moon. By this demonstration he removed comets
from the apparent vagaries of atmospheric phenomena to the orderly
domains of the celestial bodies.

It should not be thought that comets and thqjr motions were at once
completely understood. The phenomena they present are far too com-
plicated for an easy explanation. In fact, the determination of the proper-
ties of their paths through the solar system had to await Newton's dis-
covery of the law of gravitation in 1686 and his use of it in explaining the
celestial motions. He devised methods of determining the orbits of comets,
however elongated they might be.

A lifelong friend of Newton, Edmund Halley, applied Newton's
methods to computing the orbit of a great comet which had been observed
in 1682. After an enormous amount of work on this and earlier comets,
he proved that it revolves in a very elongated path, returning to the neigh-
borhood of the sun about every seventy-five years. He concluded that it
was identical with comets which had been observed in 1456, 1301, 1145*
1066, and at various other times; he boldly predicted it would return
in 1759, and it did. It came again according to predictions in 1835, and
most recently in 1910. Now it is far out in its long orbit. It has been
invisible for twenty-five years and will not be seen again for forty years
in the future. Yet mathematicians can follow it with perfect certainty,
and long before its next return they will compute the very day when it
will arrive at the point of its orbit nearest the sun.

. . . Comets differ enormously from one another in brightness, volume,
length of tails, and internal activity. From three to eleven comets are
observed each year, nearly all of them being so faint as to be invisible
without optical aid. Occasionally one appears which is bright enough to-
be easily visible to the unaided eye; about three or four times a century
a very great one becomes the most conspicuous object in the night sky.
The tails of comets develop and increase in length as these objects
approach the sun and diminish and disappear as they recede again*
While a comet is approaching the sun, its tail streams out behind; as.
it recedes, its tail projects out ahead of it. ...

THE SUN

In comparison with the universe in general, only one object in the
solar system is worth mentioning, and that object is the sun. It is a
million times greater than the earth in volume and a thousand times
greater in mass than all the planets combined. It holds the little planets
under its gravitative control, it lights and warms them with its abun-
dant rays, it takes them with it in its enormous excursions among the stars.

70 THE HEAVENS

How brilliant the light of the noonday sun is! In comparison with it
all artificial lights are feeble and dull. How intensely it warms the sur-
face of the earth on a summer's day! This general impression is not
erroneous, for accurate jneasurements prove that when its rays fall per-
pendicularly upon the surface of the earth radiant energy is received
from it at the rate of 1.5 horsepower per square yard. Under the same
condition of perpendicular rays, a square mile of surface receives radiant
energy from the sun at the rate of 4,646,400 horsepower, or at the rate of
330 million million (330,000,000,000,000) horsepower on the whole earth.
If this energy were divided equally among the two billion human beings
now living on the earth, each of them would have more than a hundred
thousand horsepower for his use.

As enormous as is the energy received by the earth from the sun, it is
trivial compared with the amount radiated by the sun, for the earth as
seen from the sun would appear to be only a point, somewhat smaller
than Venus appears to us when it is the bright evening star. It is evident
that such a distant and apparently insignificant object would intercept only
a very small fraction of the solar energy streaming out from it in every
direction. It is found by computation that the earth intercepts only one
two-billionth of the energy radiated by the sun. Otherwise expressed, the
sun radiates more energy in a second than the earth receives in sixty years.

Obviously the sun must be very hot, for otherwise it would not radiate
energy at an enormous rate. By several methods it is found that the tem-
perature of its exterior radiating layers is about ten thousand degrees
Fahrenheit, or far beyond the temperature required for melting and
volatilizing iron and other similar substances. In its deep interior the
temperatures are enormously higher, mounting to at least several million
degrees.

The temperature of the sun's interior has not, of course, been measured
by any direct means, for the depths of the sun are quite inaccessible to us.
But science often penetrates inaccessible regions by reasoning, as it does
in this case. The general principles underlying the method used in this
problem are as follows: Each layer of the sun weighs down upon the one
directly beneath it and tends to compress it. This tendency to compression
of a layer is balanced by the expansive forces due to its temperature. Now
the rates of increase downward in both density and temperature can be
determined by the condition that the entire mass of the sun shall be in
equilibrium. The results are subject to some uncertainties, however, because
of our lack of knowledge of the properties of matter under the extreme
conditions of pressure and temperature prevailing deep in the sun.

When we recall the terrestrial storms that are produced by unequal

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 71

heating of different portions of the earth's atmosphere, we naturally ex-
pect extremely violent disturbances on the sun. The wildest flights of our
imagination, however, never approach the realities, for often masses of
enormously heated gases a hundred times greater than the earth in volume
shoot upward from its surface, sometimes farther than from the earth
to the moon. Particularly in intermediate latitudes on each side of the solar
equator there are storm zones in which great whirling sun spots appear.
These sun-spot disturbances, ranging from a few thousand up to more
than a hundred thousand miles in diameter, have centers which appear
dark in contrast to the surrounding bright surface, though they are more
luminous than the filament of an electric light. In them incandescent gases
surge and billow, and from their borders eruptions to great altitudes are
particularly abundant. If our earth were placed on the surface of the sun
it would be tossed about like a pebble in a whirlpool; it would be melted
and dissipated like a snowflake in a seething lake of lava. . . .

If the sun were dissipating its mass into space, scientists would natu-
rally inquire how it is restored, but until about 1850 they did not ask
the same question respecting the energy it radiates. Until that time they
did not realize that energy is something quantitative and measurable, and
hence that its origin requires explanation. The sun cannot be a body which
was once much hotter than at present and which is slowly cooling off,
for if this were all there is to its heat it would not have lasted a thou-
sandth of the long periods of the geological ages. It cannot be simply
burning, for the heat produced by its combustion, even if it were composed
of pure coal and oxygen, would last only a few thousand years. If it
were contracting, the heat generated in the process would maintain its
radiation only a few million years, which is less than one per cent of the
interval during which it has shed its warm rays upon the earth at approxi-
mately the present rate.

Recently very conclusive reasons have been found for believing that the
energy the sun radiates is due to transformations of its elements, partic-
ularly of hydrogen, into heavier elements, and probably to the transforma-
tion of matter into energy in accordance with Einstein's principle of the
fundamental equivalence of mass and energy. These sources of energy are
of an entirely different and higher order of magnitude than any hereto-
fore considered by scientists. Although the mass equivalent of the energy
radiated by the sun in a second is over 4,000,000 tons, the mass of the sun
is so enormous that it will not be reduced through radiation by so much
as one per cent in 150,000,000,000 years. Consequently, it is not surprising
that the geological evidence is conclusive that the earth has received solar
energy at substantially the present rate for perhaps a thousand million

72 THE HEAVENS

years. Even this long interval of time is only a very small fraction of the
period during which the earth will continue in the future to be lighted
and warmed by the sun almost precisely as it is at present. The fears once
held that in a few million years the light of the sun will fail have proved
groundless, and scientists no longer look forward to a time when the earth,
cold and lifeless, will circulate endlessly around a dark center of attraction.

One of the miracles of science has been the determination of the composi-
tion of the sun. . . . The normal ear has the ability to distinguish separately
a mixture of a considerable number of tones. The eye has no correspond-
ing power — a mixture of blue and yellow, for example, appears as a
single color (green) and not as a combination of two colors. Fortunately,
a very remarkable instrument, the spectroscope, separates a mixture of light
into its component colors, or wave lengths, and enables the astronomer
to determine precisely what wave lengths are present in the radiation
from the sun, or, indeed, from any other celestial body from which
sufficient radiant energy is received. . . .

Of the ninety elements known on the earth, at least fifty have been found
to exist in the atmosphere of the sun in the gaseous state, and the presence
of several others is probable. The elements found in considerable abun-
dance in the sun include hydrogen, helium, oxygen, magnesium, iron,
silicon, sodium, potassium, calcium, aluminum, nickel, manganese,
chromium, cobalt, titanium, copper, vanadium, and zinc. Some of the
heaviest elements, such as gold and uranium, have not been found in the
sun's atmosphere, perhaps because they lie at low levels. . . .

THE STARS

As the sun rises, all the sparkling stars which sprinkle the clear night
sky pale into insignificance and totally disappear. Yet actually they are suns,
most of those which are visible to the unaided eye being much greater
than our own. Indeed, some of them radiate thousands of times as much
light, and a few are known which are millions of times greater in volume.
Their apparent insignificance is due to their incomprehensibly enormous
distances.

In order to bring within the range of our understanding the distance
from the sun to the earth, we computed the time necessary for an
imaginary skyship to travel from one of these bodies to the other at the rate
of a thousand miles per hour. We found that if it continued on its way
night and day, without pausing, it would require ten years and seven
months to traverse the ninety-three million miles between the center of
our system and this little planet of ours. Even with the aid of this calcula-
tion we do not grasp the significance of the distances in the solar system.

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 73

Perhaps we shall improve our understanding of the distances in the
solar system by noting that the velocity we assumed for our skyship was
more than 30 per cent greater than that of sound in our atmosphere, for
sounds travels at the rate of only 736 miles per hour. Let us assume that
sound could come from the sun to us at this speed. Then, if we should
see some tremendous solar explosion and should expectantly await its
thunders, we should be held in suspense before hearing *it for more than
fourteen years.

If we fail to comprehend the great distances between the members of
our solar system, we naturally shall fall far short of grasping as realities
the enormously greater distances to the stars. Yet we must attempt to do
so, and we shall find that our understanding of these distances increases as
we struggle with them. Let us start with the nearest star visible without
optical aid from northern latitudes, the brilliant Sirius, the brightest
star in all the sky. This beautiful bluish-white object is on the southern
meridian at eight o'clock in the evening about the first of March each
year. Astronomers have found by measurements that its distance is 51,700,-
000,000,000 miles, or more than 550,000 times the distance from the sun to
the earth. Therefore, more than 6,000,000 years would be required for
our imaginary skyship to fly from the solar system to Sirius.

In view of the enormous distances to even the nearest of the stars, we
naturally wonder how astronomers have measured them and whether,
after all, they are not merely conjectures resting upon no substantial
foundation. The method of determining the distances of the relatively
near stars is essentially the same as that used in determining the distance
to the moon, namely, measuring the differences in their directions as seen
from two different points. At some convenient time in the year the star
Sirius, for example, is observed to be in a certain direction from the
earth. A few months later, after the earth has moved many millions of
miles in its orbit, Sirius is found to be in a slightly different direction.
From this change in direction and the distance apart of the two points
of observation the distance of Sirius is readily computed. Obviously, the
method is entirely sound, and in the case of a star no more distant than
Sirius it is known that the results are not uncertain to more than about
one per cent of their value.

Although the direct method of measuring stellar distances is relatively
simple, the difficulties of putting it into effect are in general enormous be-
cause of the remoteness of the stars. Indeed, the greatest observed differ-
ence in direction of Sirius as observed from the earth from two points in
its orbit separated by as great a distance as even that from the earth to the
sun is extremely small. It is as small as the difference in direction of an

74 THE HEAVENS

object twenty-two miles away wher viewed first with one eye and then
with the other. Moreover, only four or five other known stars, all of which
except one are so faint as to be invisible without optical aid, are as near to
us as Sirius. Indeed, all except a few hundred stars out of the millions
which can be photographed through large telescopes are so very remote
that their distances cannot be measured by the direct method which has
been outlined. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the distances of the stars
does not stop with this limited number, for astronomers with extraor-
dinary skill have used their knowledge of the distances and other prop-
erties of these nearer stars as a basis for several other methods which
reach enormously farther into space.

Before taking up the characteristics of the stars we shall define a more
convenient unit for stellar distances which we shall often have occasion to
use. It is the distance light travels in interstellar space in a year, known as
the light-year. Since light travels in a vacuum at the rate of about 186,000
miles per second, the light-year is 5,880,000,000,000 miles, or about 60,000
times the distance from the sun to the earth. The star Sirius is distant 8.8
light-years; the stars of the Big Dipper are distant 70 to 80 light-years;
the Pleiades, about 200 light-years; the brighter stars in Orion, about 500
light-years; and the star clouds which make up the Milky Way thousands
of light-years.

In spite of the enormous distances of the stars a great deal has been
learned about them as individual bodies. In the first place, they consist
of a number of classes depending upon the properties of the light they
radiate as determined by the spectroscope. At one extreme are the blue
Class B stars, of which a number of the brighter stars in Orion are exam-
ples. These stars, which radiate many thousand times as much light as
our sun, are enormous bodies whose exterior atmospheres are at tem-
peratures ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In their
atmospheres are spectral evidences of only hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and
nitrogen.

Next come the Class A stars, which are not quite so hot or brilliant as
the Class B stars. Sirius is a splendid example of this class. Its surface
temperature is nearly twice that of the sun, and it radiates twenty-seven
times as much light. Then follow the Class F stars, of which Canopus and
Procyon are illustrations. These stars approach in temperature, brilliance,
and composition the Class G stars to which Capella and the sun belong.
Nearly half of all the stars in the catalogues of stellar spectra are closely
related to the sun. Only a few are giants of Class A, and a still smaller
number are supergiants of Class B.

Beyond the stars in the spectral sequence of class G, to which the *un

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 75

belongs, come the cooler and ruddier stars of Class K, of which Arcturus
and Aldebaran are notable examples. So far the stars of each spectral
class connect by insensible gradations with those of the next class. But at
the stars of Class K there is a discontinuity. The next class in the order
in which they are usually given are those of Class M, of which Betelgeuse
and Antares are examples. The atmospheres of these stars are at relatively
low temperatures, as would naturally be inferred from their colors, and
they contain many compounds as well as individual chemical elements.
There are three other classes of stars, classes N, R, and S, which have no
well-defined relationship to the other classes. They are all faint, with one
or two exceptions being far beyond the range of the unaided eye, they
are very few in number, and they are deep red in color. , . .

In 1650, forty years after the invention of the telescope by Galileo, the
star at the bend of the handle of the Big Dipper, which theretofore looked
like an ordinary star, was found to consist of two stars apparently almost
touching each other. It is now known, however, that these two stars are
hundreds of times as far apart as are the earth and the sun. The discovery
of this pair has been followed by the discovery of nearly 20,000 other
double stars. Probably a few of these double pairs consist of two unrelated
stars which happen to be for a time almost in the same direction from
us, but in nearly all cases they are actually twin suns revolving around
their center of gravity. The periods of revolution of most of them are so
long, however, that they have not been determined from observations in
the relatively short intervals since their discovery. . . .

In certain cases the plane of revolution of a double star passes through or
near the present position of the solar system. It is clear that when the two
stars of such a pair are in a line with the earth, one wholly or partially
eclipses the other, and at such times the light received from the pair is
temporarily reduced. If the two stars are equal in volume and equally
bright, the light received by the earth at the time of eclipse is one half
its normal value. If one star is totally dark, it may entirely eclipse the
luminous star. It is evident that many cases are theoretically possible, and
it is an interesting fact that nearly all of them have been observed.

It is clearly not difficult to determine the periods of revolution of these
variable stars, as they are called, for their periods are defined by the inter-
vals between their eclipses. But to determine the distance between the
components of such a pair is quite another matter, for they are so close
together that they appear to be a single star. Fortunately, a remarkable
application of the spectroscope, which cannot be explained here, enables
the astronomer to measure the relative velocity of a pair in their orbit;

76 THE HEAVENS

and from this velocity and the period of revolution of a pair he computes
the perimeter of their orbit, and then their distance apart. . . .

Many stars, however, are variables as a consequence of change in the
rates of their radiation. In certain cases the variations in brightness are
nearly as regular as those of eclipsing variables, though the changes are
otherwise quite different. In other cases the variations in brightness are
irregular and through wide ranges. For example, the star Omicron Ceti
is at least ten thousand times brighter at its highest maxima than at its
lowest minima. . . .

The extreme limit in variable stars is reached by the temporary stars,
or novae. These stars blaze out suddenly from obscurity to great brilliance,
in some cases increasing their radiation a hundred-thousandfold in a day
or two, only gradually to sink back to relative obscurity within a few
months. A number of these remarkable temporary stars have played
important roles in the history of astronomy. For example, the Greek
philosopher and astronomer Hipparchus (about 160-105 B.C.) made the
earliest known catalogue of stars, 1080 in number, in order to determine
whether all stars are as transitory as the nova which he observed. Another
temporary star inspired Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) to become an observer,
and another which appeared in 1572 aroused the interest of Kepler in
astronomy.

We do not know the cause of the remarkable outbursts of the novae,
which are more violent phenomena on a stellar scale than any of the little
explosions which ever take place on the earth or even than the much
greater ones on the sun. If our sun should ever become a temporary star,
our earth and the other planets would be quickly destroyed. It seems
probable, however, that only certain stars are subject to these mighty
outbursts, and that they occur again and again, separated by long intervals.
These cataclysmic phenomena teach us how little we know of violent
forces, even when we observe enormous volumes of incandescent gases
shoot up hundreds of thousands of miles from the surface of the sun.

NEBULAE

There are among the stars many faint, hazy patches called nebulae, or
little clouds. Some of them, such as that around the central star in the
Sword of Orion, are faintly visible to the unaided eye, but most of them
are found only with telescopic aid or by photography. They look like
tenuous gaseous masses, and for a long time they were thought to be
gaseous in nature, perhaps primordial world stuff out of which stars
evolve in the course of enormous periods of time. With more powerful
telescopes, however, a few of them were resolved into separate stars.

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 77

Then for a time it was supposed that probably all nebulae are swarms
of stars which can be resolved by sufficiently powerful instruments. But
toward the close of the nineteenth century this conjecture was proved by
the spectroscope to be false, for when their light was examined by this in-
strument it was found to have the properties of light radiated by luminous
gases rather than by relatively dense stars. Consequently, we now know
that the nebulae, except those which are now classed differendy, are
tenuous gases. . . .

OUR STELLAR SYSTEM

We have found that our earth is a member of a family of planets. Now
we inquire whether our sun is similarly a member of a family of stars.

When we attempt to determine whether the stars are the components
of some vast organism, we are at once confronted with serious difficulties
because of their great distances apart. For example, the distance between
our solar system and the nearest known star, the far southern Alpha
Centauri, is 4.3 light-years, or more than 25,000,000,000,000 miles. The
nearest bright star visible from northern latitudes is Sirius at a distance
of 8.8 light-years. Most of the stars within the range of the unaided eye
are many times as far away as Sirius, while most of those photographed
with large telescopes are distant more than a thousand light-years. . . .

Let us first consider the stellar density near the present position of the
solar system where the results are most trustworthy. Since it is possible
with modern instruments and photographic processes to measure with
much precision the distances of stars within thirteen light-years (76,000,-
000,000,000 miles) of the sun, we shall first examine this region around
the sun. Within this sphere of thirteen light-years in radius there are thirty
known stars, five of which are doubles and one of which is a triple. It
would be natural to expect that these relatively near stars would be in-
cluded among the hundred brightest stars in the sky. As a matter of fact,
only six of them, besides the sun, are bright enough to be visible without
optical aid, while several of them are of such low luminosity that they are
very faint in spite of their small distance from us, astronomically speaking.
Since several of these near faint stars are of recent discovery, it is probable
that there are a few others, at present unknown, which are within thirteen
light-years of our sun. For the sake of having a definite number to serve
as a basis for our calculations, we shall assume that there are thirty-five
stars within this sphere. . . .

It should not be understood that the thirty-five stars we are considering
form a system in any special sense. They are simply a small sample out
of an ocean of stars and give us some idea respecting what the general

78 THE HEAVENS

stellar system is like. At present the stars in this sphere arc near one
another, but their neighborliness is only transitory, for they are moving in
various directions at various velocities, and their mutual gravitation lacks
much of being sufficient to hold them together. In a million years they
will be far from one another and will have formed entirely different close
associates.

There are, however, families of stars in the sense that they permanently,
or at least for millions of millions of years, form a dynamical system of
mutually interacting bodies. The best-known of such families is the
Hyades stars in the constellation Taurus. About eighty of these stars are
moving together through the celestial regions like a flock of migratory
birds across the sky. Their spectra prove that they are similar in constitu-
tion, they undoubtedly had a common origin, and they are undergoing
parallel evolutions. . . .

There are several hundred other known clusters of stars besides the
Hyades family. Some of them are open groups like the Big Dipper and
the Sickle in Leo. Others are more closely related families like the Pleiades,
and in a few clusters the stars appear to be actually crowded together,
although those which are nearest each other are rarely separated by less
than a light-year. . . .

Our sun does not appear to be a member of a compact (in the astronom-
ical sense) family of stars, but it is a member of an enormous star cloud
containing millions of stars. In these larger organizations the stars do
not exhibit the similarities which are found among the stars of such
compact families as the Hyades. Nor are they moving in parallel lines at
the same speed. They consist, rather, of stars of all classes and kinds,
moving around among one another somewhat like bees in a swarm,
doubtless held loosely together by their mutual gravitation. These great
star clouds largely make up the Milky Way. Even with the unaided eye
they loom up conspicuously, under favorable conditions, in Cygnus,
Sagittarius and Scorpius. With a photographic telescope their soft mist
is resolved into myriads of stars. . . .

When we pass beyond the star cloud of which the sun is a member, we
arrive at our entire Milky Way system, or galaxy. It is composed of vast
clouds of stars and millions of individual stars spread out in the form
of a disk, the diameter of which is of the order of 60,000 light-years and
the thickness of which is perhaps one eighth as great. It is not to be under-
stood that our galaxy is homogeneous with well-defined exterior surfaces.
It is, rather, a somewhat irregular assemblage of star clouds and individual
stars, with vast regions of relatively high steller density, always decreasing,
however, toward its borders. If the average stellar density of the galactic

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 79

system were as great as it is within thirteen light-years of the sun, there
would be in our galaxy more than 50,000,000,000 stars. Although this
number may be somewhat too large, it is probable that there are several
billion stars in our Milky Way system, and the number of them may
exceed even fifty billions. It is interesting that heretofore estimates of
astronomers have always fallen short of the actualities, as have conjectures
in other fields of science.

If the solar system were at the center of the galaxy, the stars would be
symmetrically distributed around the Milky Way. The stars are, however,
much more numerous in the direction of Sagittarius and Scorpius than in
the opposite part of the heavens. This fact means that the galactic center
is in the direction of these constellations, perhaps at a distance of a few
thousand light-years. Moreover, the sun is some distance, perhaps a few
hundred light-years, north of the central plane of the galaxy, a result
which is inferred from the observed fact that stars are somewhat more
numerous on the south side than they are on the north side of the great
circle representing, at least generally, its central line. This is the position
of the solar system at present, but the sun is moving obliquely northward
from the galactic plane at the rate of a light-year in fifteen or twenty
thousand years. Consequently, if it maintains its velocity and direction
of motion for a million years, it will then be in a substantially different
part of our galaxy.

Our stellar system owes its disklike shape to its rotation, an inference
which is based on dynamical principles and which has been verified by
observations. Astronomers long ago proved the revolution of the earth
around the sun by observations of the distant stars. Now they are proving
the rotation of the enormous galaxy by measurements of velocities toward
or from systems of stars far beyond its borders. ... In spite of all the
variety in the motions of its stars and star clouds, it on the whole is
involved in an immense gyration. At the distance of the sun from its
center the velocity of its rotation is probably of the order of one or two
hundred miles per second, and the period of its rotation between fifty and
two hundred million years. It follows that during the long intervals of
the geological eras our earth in its motion with the sun has traveled
widely throughout our galactic system. . . .

GLOBULAR CLUSTERS

Somewhat outside of our galactic system, at distances ranging from
25,000 to 160,000 light-years, there are approximately a hundred great
aggregations of stars which are called globular dusters because they are
almost exactly spherical in iorm. At the distances of these clusters only

80 THE HEAVENS

giant and supergiant stars are separately visible even through large tele-
scopes. Consequently, those of their stars which are observed or photo-
graphed as separate objects are only a very small fraction of all the stars
which they contain. Yet the separately observed stars in the globular
clusters are numbered by thousands and tens of thousands, and the fainter
ones almost certainly number hundreds of thousands and probably
millions.

One of the few globular clusters visible to the unaided eye is the Great
Cluster in Hercules. At its distance of 33,000 light-years the combined
light of 400,000 stars, each equal to our sun in luminosity, would be hardly
visible to the unaided eye. Hence this cluster must be composed of an
enormous number of stars and many of high luminosity. Indeed, on a
photograph of it taken with one of the great telescopes on Mount Wilson,
the images of 40,000 stars were counted, the faintest of these stars being
approximately a hundred times as luminous as our sun. Consequently,
there can be little doubt that this immense system contains at least a
million stars as great as our sun, and probably many millions of lower
luminosity. Yet it is so far away in the depths of space that we receive
from all its millions of suns less than one sixth as much light as we
receive from the North Star.

. . . Assume that the Hercules cluster contains a hundred thousand
giant and supergiant stars and a million stars altogether. We find from
its distance and its apparent diameter that its actual diameter is about
one hundred light-years. Hence it follows that if its hundred thousand
great stars were uniformly distributed throughout its volume, the average
distance between those which are adjacent would be more than two light-
years, or about 140,000 times the distance from the sun to the earth. If
we include the million stars in our computation, we find that the average
distance between neighbors is about one light-year. . . . Even the giant
stars in the clusters are no brighter as seen from one another than Venus
is as observed from the earth.

The globular clusters are dynamically mature; that is, they have
arrived at a state in which as a whole they remain unchanged, although
their individual stars are in ceaseless motion. Since many other aggre-
gations of stars, such as our galaxy and its star clouds, are very irregular
in structure, it does not seem probable that the globular clusters have
always had their present perfect symmetries. Perhaps better support for
our opinion that the stars in them were once irregularly distributed is
found in the exterior galaxies which are usually, but not always, far from
symmetrical.

If the present nearly spherical forms of the globular clusters are due

THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE 81

to dynamical evolutions, we may inquire how great must have been the
interval o£ time between some earlier, heterogeneous state and their present
conditions. We first find the astonishing result that the period of the
circuit of a star around the Hercules cluster, or from near its exterior
deep into its interior and out again somewhere else, is of the order of ten
million years. We next note that the dynamical evolution which we are
considering is due primarily to the near approaches of the stars, just as
the uniform distribution of molecules of various kinds in a gas is due
primarily to their collisions which occur with great frequency; indeed,
on the average, five thousand million times a second.

The distances between the stars in the clusters are so great that, on the
average, a star will make ten thousand circuits before it will pass near
enough another star to have the direction of its motion changed by as
much as twenty degrees. That is, on the average it moves for a hundred
thousand million years (ten thousand times ten million years) as though
the mass of the cluster were not concentrated into stars. Then it passes so
near one of these concentrations of mass (one of the stars) that the
direction of its motion is appreciably changed. After a very large number,
perhaps a million, of these adventures all the earlier heterogeneities are
smoothed out with a resulting globular cluster of stars. That is, the very
organization of the globular clusters proves that these spherical masses
of stars have been undergoing independent evolutions for at least millions
of millions of years. In the course of time, however, these symmetrical
structures may pass near or through somewhat similar aggregations and
be transformed into spinning irregular spirals similar to our galaxy,

EXTERIOR GALAXIES

We have often called the Milky Way system of stars "our" galaxy, as
though it were something we possess, or which is at least in our immediate
neighborhood. From the standpoint of the earth or even of the whole solar
system our language has been presumptuous, for we have explored tens
of thousands of light-years, or hundreds of millions of times the distance
from our planet to the sun. . . . But all these objects are of secondary
importance and interest in comparison with the enormous galaxy known
as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. Until within a few years astronomers
gazed up at this hazy patch of light, which is just within the range of
the unaided eye, and thought they were looking only at a tenuous nebula
lying out toward the borders of our stellar system. Now they know that
what they have been seeing is a great exterior galaxy, which in magnitude,
in number of stars, and in structure is similar to our own.

The distance from our present position to the Great Nebula in An-

82 THE HEAVENS

dromeda is about 900,000 light-years. Consequently, we see this galaxy
not as it is now but as it was before our ancestors evolved to the level
of men. . . . The so-called Andromeda nebula is actually a galaxy in
every essential respect similar to our own, a much flattened disk of many
billions of stars, having a diameter of something like 80,000 light-years
and rotating in a period of perhaps 150,000,000 years.

There are within a million light-years of the solar system six known
galaxies, including our own. But outside of this great sphere there are
hundreds of thousands of other galaxies within easy reach of large photo-
graphic telescopes. . . .

From atoms to galaxies each physical unit is made up of smaller units —
atoms of protons and electrons, molecules of atoms, stars of molecules,
galaxies of stars. We naturally inquire whether the galaxies we observe
are not components of still greater cosmic units; whether our Milky Way
system, for example, the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda galaxy and
others which are relatively near are not the constituents of a supergalaxy
enormously greater than any one of them, and perhaps millions of light-
years in diameter. Although the field which we are considering is rela-
tively new, astronomers have already found numerous aggregations of
galaxies into supergalaxies. For example, Harlow Shapley has described
a supergalaxy in the direction of Centaurus, but a hundred and fifty
million light-years beyond the stars of this constellation, which is com-
posed of more than three hundred galaxies, all of which are probably
comparable to our own steller system. The space occupied by this super-
galaxy is an oval about seven million light-years in length and two million
light-years in diameter. It is so vast that the average distance between
those of its galaxies which are adjacent is approximately a million light-
years.

What is beyond the supergalaxies? There is no observational evidence
bearing upon the question. There are good theoretical reasons, however,
for concluding that they do not extend on through an infinite space with
the approximate frequency which is found within a few hundred million
light-years of our own galaxy. According to certain deductions from the
theory of relativity they are limited in number, and space itself is limited
in extent. On the other hand, the supergalaxies which we now know
may be the component units of enormously greater supergalaxies of the
second order. And these supergalaxies of the second order may be the
constituents of supergalaxies of the third order, and so on upward in an
unending sequence. And, just as molecules are composed of atoms, and
atoms of protons and electrons, so protons and electrons may be made up

IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? 83

of still smaller units, and so on downward in an unending sequence of
units.

Naturally, it is unsafe to draw any positive conclusions respecting super-
galaxies of higher order or respecting subelectrons, for direct evidence
is lacking and we can reason only by analogy. It is even more hazardous
to speculate regarding a creation of the physical universe, for observa-
tional evidence is equally lacking, and there is not even analogy as a
guide. Consequently, though science has placed us on an eminence from
which we see very far, beyond our horizon there still lies a challenging
unknown.

Is There Life on Other Worlds?

SIR JAMES JEANS

CJO LONG AS THE EARTH WAS BELIEVED TO BE THE
*^ center of the universe the question of life on other worlds could
hardly arise; there were no other worlds in the astronomical sense, although
a heaven above and a hell beneath might form adjuncts to this world.
The cosmology of the Divina Commedia is typical of its period. In 1440
we find Nicholas of Cusa comparing our earth, as Pythagoras had done
before him, to the other stars, although without expressing any opinion as
to whether these other stars were inhabited or not. At the end of the next
century Giordano Bruno wrote that "there are endless particular worlds
similar to this of the earth." He plainly supposed these other worlds — "the
moon, planets and other stars, which are infinite in number" — to be
inhabited, since he regarded their creation as evidence of the Divine
goodness. He was burned at the stake in 1600; had he lived only ten years
longer, his convictions would have been strengthened by Galileo's discovery
of mountains and supposed seas on the moon.
The arguments of Kepler and Newton led to a general recognition that

84 THE HEAVENS

the stars were not other worlds like our earth but other suns like our sun.
When once this was accepted it became natural to imagine that they also
were surrounded by planets and to picture each sun as showering life-sus-
taining light and heat on inhabitants more or less like ourselves. In 1829
a New York newspaper scored a great journalistic hit by giving a vivid,
but wholly fictitious, account of the activities of the inhabitants of the
moon as seen through the telescope recently erected by His Majesty's
Government at the Cape.

It would be a long time before we could see what the New York paper
claimed to see on the moon — batlike men flying through the air and
inhabiting houses in trees — even if it were there to see. To see an object
of human size on the moon in detail we should need a telescope of from
10,000 to a 100,000 inches aperture, and even then we should have to wait
years, or more probably centuries, before the air was still and clear enough
for us to see details of human size.

To detect general evidence of life on even the nearest of the planets
would demand far larger telescopes than anything at present in existence,
unless this evidence occupied an appreciable fraction of the planet's surface.
The French astronomer Flammarion once suggested that if chains of light
were placed on the Sahara on a sufficiently generous scale, they might be
visible to Martian astronomers if any such there be. If this light were
placed so as to form a mathematical pattern, intelligent Martians might
conjecture that there was intelligent life on earth. Flammarion thought
that the lights might suitably be arranged to illustrate the theorem of
Pythagoras (Euclid, i. 47). Possibly a better scheme would be a group of
searchlights which could emit successive flashes to represent a series of
numbers. If, for instance, the numbers 3, 5, 7, n, 13, 17, 19, 23 ... (the
sequence of primes) were transmitted, the Martians might surely infer the
existence of intelligent Tellurians. But any visual communication between
planets would need a combination of high telescopic power at one end
and of engineering works on a colossal, although not impossible, scale at
the other.

Some astronomers — mainly in the past — have thought that the so-called
canals on Mars provided evidence of just this kind, although of course
unintentionally on the part of the Martians. Two white patches which
surround the two poles of Mars are observed to increase and decrease with
the seasons, like our terrestrial polar ice. Over the surface of Mars some
astronomers have claimed to see a geometrical network of straight lines,
which they have interpreted as a system of irrigation canals, designed to
bring melted ice from these polar caps to parched equatorial regions.
Percival Lowell calculated that this could be done by a pumping system

IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? 85

of 4,000 times the power of Niagara. It is fairly certain now that the polar
caps are not of ice, but even if they were, the radiation of the summer sun
on Mars is so feeble that it could not melt more than a very thin layer of
ice before the winter cold came to freeze it solid again. Actually the caps
are observed to change very rapidly and are most probably clouds con-
sisting of some kind of solid particles.

The alleged canals cannot be seen at all in the largest telescopes nor
can they be photographed, but there are technical reasons why neither of
these considerations is conclusive against the existence of the canals. A
variety of evidence suggests, however, that the canals are mere subjective
illusions — the result of overstraining the eyes in trying to see every detail
of a never very brightly illuminated surface. Experiments with school chil-
dren have shown that under such circumstances the strained eye tends to
connect patches of color by straight lines. This will at least explain why
various astronomers have claimed to see straight lines not only on Mars,
where it is just conceivable that there might be canals, but also on Mercury
and the largest satellite of Jupiter, where it seems beyond the bounds of
possibility that canals could have been constructed, as well as on Venus, on
which real canals could not possibly be seen since its solid surface is entirely
hidden under clouds. It may be significant that E. E. Barnard, perhaps the
most skilled observer that astronomy has ever known, was never able to
see the canals at all, although he studied Mars for years through the largest
telescopes.

A more promising line of approach to our problem is to examine which,
if any, of the planets is physically suitable for life. But we are at once con-
fronted with the difficulty that we do not know what precise conditions
are necessary for life. A human being transferred to the surface of any
one of the planets or of their satellites, would die at once, and this for
several different reasons on each. On Jupiter he would be simultaneously
frozen, asphyxiated, and poisoned, as well as doubly pressed to death by
his own weight and by an atmospheric pressure of about a million terres-
trial atmospheres. On Mercury he would be burned to death by the sun's
heat, killed by its ultra-violet radiation, asphyxiated from want of oxygen,
and desiccated from want of water. But this does not touch the question
of whether other planets may not have developed species of life suited to
their own physical conditions. When we think of the vast variety of con-
ditions under which terrestrial life exists on earth — plankton, soil bacteria,
stone bacteria, and the great variety of bacteria which are parasitic on the
higher forms of life — it would seem rash to suggest that there are any
physical conditions whatever to which life cannot adapt itself. Yet as the
physical states of other planets are so different from that of our own, it

86 THE HEAVENS

seems safe to say that any life there may be on any of them must be very
different from the life on earth.

The visible surface of Jupiter has a temperature of about — 138° C,
which represents about 248 degrees of frost on the Fahrenheit scale. The
planet probably comprises an inner core of rock, with a surrounding layer
of ice some 16,000 miles in thickness, and an atmosphere which again is
several thousands of miles thick and exerts the pressure of a million
terrestrial atmospheres which we have already mentioned. The only known
constituents of this atmosphere are the poisonous gases methane and
ammonia. It is certainly hard to imagine such a planet providing a home
for life of any kind whatever. The planets Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and
Pluto, being farther from the sun, are almost certainly even colder than
Jupiter and in all probability suffer from at least equal disabilities as
abodes of life.

Turning sunward from these dismal planets, we come first to Mars,
where we find conditions much more like those of our own planet. The
average temperature is about —40° C., which is also —40° on the Fahren-
heit scale, but the temperature rises above the freezing point on summer
afternoons in the equatorial regions. The atmosphere contains at most
only small amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide, perhaps none at all, so
that there can be no vegetation comparable with that of the earth. The
surface, in so far as it can be tested by a study of its powers of reflection
and polarization, appears to consist of lava and volcanic ash. To us it may
not seem a promising or comfortable home for life, but life of some kind
or other may be there nevertheless.

Being at the same average distance from the sun as the earth, the moon
has about the same average temperature, but the variations around this
average temperature are enormous, the equatorial temperature varying
roughly from 120° C. to — 80° C. The telescope shows high ranges of
mountains, apparently volcanic, interspersed with flat plains of volcanic
ash. The moon has no atmosphere and consequently no water; it shows
no signs of life or change of any kind, unless perhaps for rare falls of
rock such as might result from the impact of meteors falling in from outer
space. A small town on the moon, perhaps even a large building, ought to
be visible in our largest telescopes, but, needless to say, we see nothing of
the kind.

Venus, the planet next to the earth, presents an interesting problem.
It is similar to the earth in size but being nearer the sun is somewhat
warmer. As it is blanketed in cloud we can only guess as to the nature of
its surface. But its atmosphere can be studied and is found to contain
little or no oxygen, so that the planet's surface can hardly be covered with

IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? 87

vegetation as the surface of the earth is. Indeed, its surface is probably so
hot that water would boil away. Yet no trace of water vapor is found in
the atmosphere, so that the planet may well be devoid of water. There are
reasons for thinking that its shroud of clouds may consist of solid par-
ticles, possibly hydrates of formaldehyde. Clearly any life that this planet
may harbor must be very different from that of the earth.

The only planet that remains is Mercury. This always turns the same
face to the sun and its temperature ranges from about 420° C. at the center
of this face to unimaginable depths of cold in the eternal night of the face
which never sees the sun. The planet is too feeble gravitationally to retain
much of an atmosphere and its surface, in so far as this can be tested,
appears to consist mainly of volcanic ash like the moon and Mars. Once
again we have a planet which does not appear promising as an abode of
life and any life that there may be must be very different from our own.

Thus our survey of the solar system forces us to the conclusion that it
contains no place other than our earth which is at all suitable for life at
all resembling that existing on earth. The other planets are ruled out
largely by unsuitable temperatures. It used to be thought that Mars might
have had a temperature more suited to life in some past epoch when the
sun's radiation was more energetic than it now is, and that similarly
Venus can perhaps look forward to a more temperate climate in some
future age. But these possibilities hardly accord with modern views of
stellar evolution. The sun is now thought to be a comparatively unchanging
structure, which has radiated much as now through the greater part of its
past life and will continue to do the same until it changes cataclysmically
into a minute "white dwarf" star. When this happens there will be a fall
of temperature too rapid for life to survive anywhere in the solar system
and too great for new life ever to get a foothold. As regards suitability for
life, the earth seems permanently to hold a unique position among the
bodies surrounding our sun.

Our sun is, however, only one of myriads of stars in space. Our own
galaxy alone contains about 100,000 million stars, and there are perhaps
10,000 million similar galaxies in space. Stars are about as numerous in
space as grains of sand in the Sahara. What can we say about the possibili-
ties of life on planets surrounding these other suns ?

We want first to know whether these planets exist. Observational astron-
omy can tell us nothing; if every star in the sky were surrounded by a
planetary system like that of our sun, no telescope on earth could reveal a
single one of these planets. Theory can tell us a little more. While there
is some doubt as to the exact manner in which the sun acquired its family
of planets, all modern theories are at one in supposing that it was the

88 THE HEAVENS

result of the close approach of another star. Other stars in the sky must
also experience similar approaches, although calculation shows that such
events must be excessively rare. Under conditions like those which now
prevail in the neighborhood of the sun, a star will experience an approach
close enough to generate planets only about once in every million million
million years. If we suppose the star to have lived under these conditions
for about 2,000 million years, only one star in 500 million will have expe-
rienced the necessary close encounter, so that at most one star in 500
million will be surrounded by planets. This looks an absurdly minute
fraction of the whole, yet when the whole consists of a thousand million
million million stars, this minute fraction represents two million million
stars. On this calculation, then two million million stars must already be
surrounded by planets and a new solar system is born every few hours.
The calculation probably needs many adjustments; for instance, condi-
tions near our sun are not necessarily typical of conditions throughout
space and the conditions of today are probably not typical of conditions in
past ages. Indeed, on any reasonable view of stellar evolution, each star
must have begun its life as a vast mass of nebulous gas, in which state it
would present a far more vulnerable target than now for disruptive attacks
by other stars. Detailed calculation shows that the chance of a star's
producing planets in this early stage, although not large, would be quite
considerable, and suggests, with a large margin to spare, that although
planetary systems may be rare in space, their total number is far from
insignificant. Out of the thousands or millions of millions of planets that
there must surely be in space, a very great number must have physical
conditions very similar to those prevailing on earth.

We cannot even guess whether these are inhabited by life like our own
or by life of any kind whatever. The same chemical atoms exist there as
exist here and must have the same properties, so that it is likely that the
same inorganic compounds have formed there as have formed here. If so,
we would like to know how far the chain of life has progressed, but
present-day science can give no help. We can only wonder whether any
life there may be elsewhere in the universe has succeeded in managing it*
affairs better than we have done in recent years.

1941

The Milky Way ana Beyond

SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON

IN ONE OF JULES VERNE'S STORIES THE ASTRONOMER
begins his lecture with the words "Gentlemen, you have seen the moon
— or at least heard tell of it." I think I may in the same way presume that
you are acquainted with the Milky Way, which can be seen on any clear
dark night as a faintly luminous band forming an arch from horizon to
horizon. The telescopes show that it is composed of multitudes of stars.
One is tempted to say "countless multitudes"; but it is part of the business
of an astronomer to count them, and the number is not uncountable
though it amounts to more than ten thousand millions. The number
of stars in the Milky Way is considerably greater than the number of
human beings on the earth. Each star, I may remind you, is an immense
fiery globe of the same general nature as our sun.

There is no sharp division between the distant stars which form the
Milky Way and the brighter stars which we see strewn over the sky.
All these stars taken together form one system or galaxy; its extent is
enormous but not unlimited. Since we are situated inside it we do not
obtain a good view of its form; but we are able to see far away in space
other galaxies which also consist of thousands of millions of stars, and
presumably if we could see our own galaxy from outside, it would appear
like one of them. These other galaxies are known as "spiral nebulae."
We believe that our own Milky Way system is more or less like them. If so,
the stars form a flat coil — rather like a watch-spring — except that the coil
is double.

When we look out in directions perpendicular to the plane of the
coil, we soon reach the limit of the system; but in the plane of the coil
we see stars behind stars until they become indistinguishable and fade
into the hazy light of the Milky Way. It has been ascertained that we
are a very long way from the centre of our own galaxy, so that there are
many more stars on one side of us than on the other.

90 THE HEAVENS

Looking at one of these galaxies, it is impossible to resist the impression
that it is whirling round— like a Catherine Wheel. It has, in fact, been
possible to prove that some of the spiral nebulae are rotating, and to
measure the rate of rotation. Also by studying the motions of the stars in
our own galaxy, it has been found that it too is rotating about a centre.
The centre is situated a long way from us in the constellation Ophiuchus
near a particularly bright patch of the Milky Way; the actual centre is,
however, hidden from us by a cloud of obscuring matter. My phrase,
"whirling round," may possibly give you a wrong impression. With these
vast systems we have to think in a different scale of space and time, and
the whirling is slow according to our ordinary ideas. It takes about 300
million years for the Milky Way to turn round once. But after all that is
not so very long. Geologists tell us that the older rocks in the earth's
crust were formed 1300 million years ago; so the sun, carrying with it the
earth and planets, has made four or five complete revolutions round the
centre of the galaxy within geological times.

The stars which form our Milky Way system show a very wide diver-
sity. Some give out more than 10,000 times as much light and heat as
the sun; others less than i/iooth. Some are extremely dense and com-
pact; others are extremely tenuous. Some have a surface temperature as
high as 20,000 or 30,000° C.; others not more than 3000° C. Some are
believed to be pulsating — swelling up and deflating within a period of a
few days or weeks; these undergo great changes of light and heat accom-
panying the expansion and collapse. It would be awkward for us if our
sun behaved that way. A considerable proportion (about 1/3 of the whole
number) go about in pairs, forming "double stars"; the majority, how-
ever, are bachelors like the sun.

But in spite of this diversity, the stars have one comparatively uniform
characteristic, namely their mass, that is, the amount of matter which
goes to form them. A range from 1/5 to 5 times the sun's mass would
cover all but the most exceptional stars; and the general run of the masses
is within an even narrower range. Among a hundred stars picked at
random the diversity of mass would not be greater proportionately than
among a hundred men, women and children picked at random from a
crowd.

Broadly speaking, a big star is big, not because it contains an excessive
amount of material, but because it is puffed out like a balloon; and a
small star is small because its material is highly compressed. Our sun,
which is intermediate in this, as in most respects, has a density rather
greater than that of water. (The sun is in every way a typical middle-class
star.) The two extremes—the extremely rarefied and the extremely dense

THE MILKY WAY AND BEYOND 91

stars — are especially interesting. We find stars whose material is as tenuous
as a gas. The well-known star Capella, for example, has an average density
about equal to that of air; to be inside Capella would be like being
surrounded by air, as we ordinarily are, except that the temperature
(which is about 5,000,000° C) is hotter than we are accustomed to. Still
more extreme are the red giant stars Betelgeuse in Orion and Antares in
Scorpio. To obtain a star like Betelgeuse, we must imagine the sun swell-
ing out until it has swallowed up Mercury, Venus and the Earth, and
has a circumference almost equal to the orbit of Mars. The density of
this vast globe is that of a gas in a rather highly exhausted vessel. Betel-
geuse could be described as "a rather good vacuum."

At the other extreme are the "white dwarf stars, which have extrava-
gantly high density. I must say a little about the way in which this was
discovered.

Between 1916 and 1924 I was very much occupied trying to understand
the internal constitution of the stars, for example, finding the temperature
in the deep interior, which is usually ten million degrees, and making out
what sort of properties matter would have at such high temperatures.
Physicists had recently been making great advances in our knowledge of
atoms and radiation; and the problem was to apply this new knowledge
to the study of what was taking place inside a star. In the end I obtained
a formula by which, if you knew the mass of a star, you could calculate
how bright it ought to be. An electrical engineer will tell you that to
produce a certain amount of illumination you must have a dynamo of a
size which he will specify; somewhat analogously I found that for a star
to give a certain amount of illumination it must have a definite mass
which the formula specified. This formula, however, was not intended
to apply to all stars, but only to diffuse stars with densities corresponding
to a gas, because the problem became too complicated if the material
could not be treated as a perfect gas.

Having obtained the theoretical formula, the next thing was to compare
it with observation. That is where the trouble often begins. And there
was trouble in this case; only it was not of the usual kind. The observed
masses and luminosities agreed with the formulae all right; the trouble
was that they would not stop agreeing! The dense stars for which the
formula was not intended agreed just as well as the diffuse stars for
which the formula was intended. This surprising result could only mean
that, although their densities were as great as that of water or iron, the
stellar material was nevertheless behaving like a gas; in particular, it
was compressible like an ordinary gas.

We had been rather blind not to have foreseen this. Why is it that we

92 THE HEAVENS

can compress air, but cannot appreciably compress water? It is because
in air the ultimate particles (the molecules) are wide apart, with plenty
of empty space between them. When we compress air we merely pack
the molecules a bit closer, reducing the amount of vacant space. But in
water the molecules are practically in contact and cannot be packed any
closer. In all substances the ordinary limit of compression is when the
molecules jam in contact; after that we cannot appreciably increase the
density. This limit corresponds approximately to the density of the solid
or liquid state. We had been supposing that the same limit would apply
in the interior of a star. We ought to have remembered that at the temper-
ature of millions of degrees there prevailing the atoms are highly ionized,
i.e. broken up. An atom has a heavy central nucleus surrounded by a
widely extended but insubstantial structure of electrons — a sort of
crinoline. At the high temperature in the stars this crinoline of electrons
is broken up. If you are calculating how many dancers can be accom-
modated in a ball-room, it makes a difference whether the ladies wear
crinolines or not. Judging by the crinolined terrestrial atoms we should
reach the limit of compression at densities not much greater than water;
but the uncrinolined stellar atoms can pack much more densely, and do
not jam together until densities far beyond terrestrial experience are
reached.

This suggested that there might exist stars of density greater than any
material hitherto known, which called to mind a mystery concerning the
Companion of Sirius. The dog-star Sirius has a faint companion close
to it, visible in telescopes of moderate power. There is a method of finding
densities of stars which I must not stop to explain. The method is rather
tentative; and when it was found to give for the Companion of Sirius
a density 50,000 times greater than water, it was naturally assumed that
it had gone wrong in its application. But in the light of the foregoing
discussion, it now seemed possible that the method had not failed, and
that the extravagantly high density might be genuine. So astronomers
endeavoured to check the determination of density by another method
depending on Einstein's relativity theory. The second method confirmed
the high density, and it is now generally accepted. The stuff of the
Companion of Sirius is 2000 times as dense as platinum. Imagine a
match-box filled with this matter. It would need a crane to lift it — it
would weigh a ton.

I am afraid that what I have to say about the stars is largely a matter
of facts and figures. There is only one star near enough for us to study
its surface, namely our sun. Ordinary photographs of the sun show few
features, except the dark spots which appear at times. But much more

THE MILKY WAY AND BEYOND 93

interesting photographs are obtained by using a spectro-heliograph, which
is an instrument blind to all light except that of one particular wave
length — coming from one particular kind of atom.

Now let us turn to the rest of the universe which lies beyond the Milky
Way. Our galaxy is, as it were, an oasis of matter in the desert of empti-
ness, an island in the boundless ocean of space. From our own island we
see in the far distance other islands — in fact a whole archipelago of
islands one beyond another till our vision fails. One of the nearest of
diem can actually be seen with the naked eye; it is in the constellation
Andromeda, and looks like a faint, rather hazy, star. The light which
we now see has taken 900,000 years to reach us. When we look at that
faint object in Andromeda we are looking back 900,000 years into the
past. Some of the telescopic spiral nebulae are much more distant. The
most remote that has yet been examined is 300,000,000 light-years away.

These galaxies are very numerous. From sample counts it is found
that more than a million of them are visible in our largest telescopes; and
there must be many more fainter ones which we do not see. Our sun
is just one star in a system of thousands of millions of stars; and that
whole system is just one galaxy in a universe of thousands of millions
of galaxies.

Let us pause to see where we have now got to in the scale of size. The
following comparative table of distances will help to show us where we
are:

Kilometres

Distance of the sun 150,000,000

Limit of the solar system (Orbit of Pluto) .... 5,800,000,000

Distance of the nearest star 40,000,000,000,000

Distance of nearest external galaxy 8,000,000,000,000,000,000

Distance of furthest galaxy yet observed .... 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Some people complain that they cannot realize these figures. Of course
they cannot. But that is the last thing one wants to do with big numbers —
to "realize" them. In a few weeks time our finance minister in England
will be presenting his annual budget of about ^900,000,000. Do you sup-
pose that by way of preparation, he throws himself into a state of trance in
which he can visualize the vast pile of coins or notes or commodities
that it represents? I am quite sure he cannot "realize" ^900,000,000. But
he can spend it. It is a fallacious idea that these big numbers create a
difficulty in comprehending astronomy; they can only do so if you are
seeking the wrong sort of comprehension. They are not meant to be
gaped at, but to be manipulated and used. It is as easy to use millions

94 THE HEAVENS

and billions and trillions for our counters as ones and twos and threes.
What I want to call attention to in the above table is that since we are
going out beyond the Milky Way we have taken a very big step up in
the scale of distance.

The remarkable thing that has been discovered about these galaxies
is that (except three or four of the nearest of them) they are running
away from our own galaxy; and the further they are away, the faster they
go. The distant ones have very high speeds. On the average the speed
is proportional to the distance, so that a galaxy 10 million light-years
away recedes at 1500 kilometres per second, one 50 million light-years
away recedes at 7500 kilometres per second, and so on. The fastest yet
discovered recedes at 42,000 kilometres per second.

Why are they all running away from us ? If we think a little, we shall
see that the aversion is not especially directed against us; they are running
away from us, but they are also running away from each other. If this
room were to expand 10 per cent in its dimensions, the seats all separating
in proportion, you would at first think that everyone was moving away
from you; the man 10 metres away has moved i metre further off; the
man 20 metres away has moved 2 metres further off; and so on. Just
as with the galaxies, the recession is proportional to the distance. This
law of proportion is characteristic of a uniform expansion, not directed
away from any one centre, but causing a general scattering apart. So we
conclude that recession of the nebulae is an eflect of uniform expansion.

The system of the galaxies is all the universe we know, and indeed
we have strong reason to believe that it is the whole physical universe.
The expansion of the system, or scattering apart of the galaxies, is there-
fore commonly referred to as the expansion of the universe; and the
problem which it raises is the problem of the "expanding universe."

The expansion is proceeding so fast that, at the present rate, the nebulae
will recede to double their present distances in 1300 million years. Astron-
omers will have to double the apertures of their telescopes every 1300
million years in order to keep pace with the recession. But seriously 1300
million years is not a long period of cosmic history; I have already men-
tioned it as the age of terrestrial rocks. It comes as a surprise that the
universe should have doubled its dimensions within geological times.
It means that we cannot go back indefinitely in time; and indeed the
enormous time-scale of billions [The English "billion" is equivalent to
the American "trillion."] of years, which was fashionable ten years ago,
must be drastically cut down. We are becoming reconciled to this speed-
ing up of the time-scale of evolution, for various other lines of evidence
have convinced us that it is essential. It seems clear now that we must

THE MILKY WAY AND BEYOND 95

take an upper limit to the age of the stars not greater than 10,000 million
years; previously, an age of a thousand times longer was commonly
adopted.

For reasons which I cannot discuss fully we believe that along with
the expansion of the material universe there is an expansion of space
itself. The idea is that the island galaxies are scattered throughout a
"spherical space." Spherical space means that if you keep going straight
on in any direction you will ultimately find yourself back at your starting
point. This is analogous to what happens when you travel straight ahead
on the earth; you reach your starting point again, having gone round the
world. But here we apply the analogy to an extra dimension — to space
instead of to a surface. I realize, of course, that this conception of a
closed spherical space is very difficult to grasp, but really it is not worse
than the older conception of infinite open space which no one can properly
imagine. No one can conceive infinity; one just uses the term by habit
without trying to grasp it. If I may refer to our English expression, "out
of the frying-pan into the fire," I suggest that if you feel that in receiving
this modern conception of space you are falling into the fire, please
remember that you are at least escaping from the frying-pan.

Spherical space has many curious properties. I said that if you go
straight ahead in any direction you will return to your starting point. So
if you look far enough in any direction and there is nothing in the way,
you ought to see — the back of your head. Well, not exactly — because
light takes at least 6000 million years to travel round the universe and
your head was not there when it started. But you will understand the
general idea. However, these curiosities do not concern us much. The
main point is that if the galaxies are distributed over the spherical space
more or less in the same way that human beings are distributed over the
earth, they cannot form an expanding system — they cannot all be receding
from one another — unless the space itself expands. So the expansion of
the material system involves, and is an aspect of, an expansion of space.

This scattering apart of the galaxies was not unforeseen. As far back
as 1917, Professor W. de Sitter showed that there was reason to expect
this phenomenon and urged astronomers to look for it. But it is only
recently that radial velocities of spiral nebulae have been measured in
sufficient numbers to show conclusively that the scattering occurs. It is
one of the deductions from relativity theory that there must exist a force,
known as "cosmical repulsion," which tends to produce this kind of
scattering in which every object recedes from every other object. You
know the theory of relativity led to certain astronomical consequences
— a bending of light near the sun detectable at eclipses, a motion of the

96 THE HEAVENS

perihelion of Mercury, a red-shift of spectral lines — which have been
more or less satisfactorily verified. The existence of cosmical repulsion
is an equally definite consequence of the theory, though this is not so
widely known — partly because it comes from a more difficult branch of
the theory and was not noticed so early, and perhaps partly because it is
not so directly associated with the magic name of Einstein.

I can see no reason to doubt that the observed recession of the spiral
nebulae is due to cosmical repulsion, and is the effect predicted by
relativity theory which we were hoping to find. Many other explanations
have been proposed — some of them rather fantastic — and there has been
a great deal of discussion which seems to me rather pointless. In this, as
in other developments of scientific exploration, we must recognize the
limitations of our present knowledge and be prepared to consider revolu-
tionary changes. But when, as in this case, observation agrees with what
our existing knowledge had led us to expect, it is reasonable to feel
encouraged to pursue the line of thought which has proved successful;
and there seems little excuse for an outburst of unsupported speculation.

. , , Now we have been all over the universe. If my survey has been
rather inadequate, I might plead that light takes 6000 million years to
make the circuit that I have made in an hour. Or rather, that was the
original length of the circuit; but the universe is expanding continually,
and whilst I have been talking the increase of the circuit amounts to one
or two more days' journey for the light. Anyhow, the time has come to
leave this nightmare of immensity and find again, among the myriads
of orbs, the tiny planet which is our home.

'957

B. THE EARTH

A Young Man Looking at Rocks

HUGH MILLER

From The Old Red Sandstone

rY ADVICE TO YOUNG WORKING MEN DESIROUS OF
bettering their circumstances, and adding to the amount of their
enjoyment, is a very simple one. Do not seek happiness in what is mis-
named pleasure; seek it rather in what is termed study. Keep your con-
sciences clear, your curiosity fresh, and embrace every opportunity of
cultivating your minds. You will gain nothing by attending Chartist
meetings. The fellows who speak nonsense with fluency at these assem-
blies, and deem their nonsense eloquence, are totally unable to help either
you or themselves : or, if they do succeed in helping themselves, it will be
all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set yourselves
to occupy your leisure hours in making yourselves wiser men. Learn to
make a right use of your eyes; the commonest things are worth looking
at — even stones and weeds, and the most familiar animals.

It was twenty years last February since I set out, a little before sunrise
to make my first acquaintance with a life of labour and restraint: and I
have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim,
loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance,
and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woeful change! I was now
going to work at what Burns has instanced, in his "Twa Dogs" as one of
the most disagreeable of all employments, — to work in a quarry. Bating
the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the
portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the
common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods, a reader of
curious books when I could get them, a gleaner of old traditionary stories:
and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams, and all my amuse-

98 THE EARTH

ments, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be
enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble
inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side,
and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red
Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial
clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet,
and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an
open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments,
which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my
first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel
soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe, and I
wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below,
which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up
and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers, were applied by my
brother- workers; and, simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard
these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them.
They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into
one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new
to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one; it had the merit, too, of
being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excur-
sion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few
capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense
mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds,
that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in
the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one "was a pretty
cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the
gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been
preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the wood-
pecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow. I was
engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be senti-
mental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the
contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts,
and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer
bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun
sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of
the trees stretching downwards towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so
much dreaded. To be sure, my hanas were a little sore, and I felt nearly
as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had
wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as
usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted, by a rare

A YOUNG MAN LOOKING AT ROCKS 99

transmutation, into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully
describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of
my brother-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and
the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields;
but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed, as it
advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so
pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the
year.

The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the interior strata,
and our first employment, on resuming our labours, was to raise it from
its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was much
struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested. The
entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been
left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every bend and curvature,
every cross hollow and counter ridge, of the corresponding phenomena;
for the resemblance was no half resemblance, — it was the thing itself;
and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times, when sailing my
little schooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the
waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what element had they
been composed ? I felt as completely at fault as Robinson Crusoe did on his
discovering the print of the man's foot on the sand. The evening furnished
me with still further cause of wonder. We raised another block in a
different part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular depres-
sion in the stratum below was broken and flawed in every direction, as
if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk
and split in the hardening. Several large stones came rolling down from
the diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were of different
qualities from the sandstone below, and from one another; and, what was
more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water-worn, as if they had
been tossed about in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.
There could not, surely, be a more conclusive proof that the bank which
had enclosed them so long could not have been created on the rock on
which it rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, and
the stones were all half -worn! And if not the bank, why then the sand-
stone underneath? I was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough
for thought that evening, without once thinking of the unhappiness of a
life of labour.

The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clear away rendered
the working of the quarry laborious and expensive, and all the party
quitted it in a few days, to make trial of another that seemed to promise
better. The one we left is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore
of an inland bay, — the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we removed

100 THE EARTH

has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern
shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found I was to be no loser by the change.
Not the united labours of a thousand men for more than a thousand years
could have furnished a better section of the geology of the district than this
range of cliffs. It may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the
earth's crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of
granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses
o£ horneblend; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of
sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We
discover the still little-known but highly interesting fossils of the Old
Red Sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells
and lignites of the Lias in another. There are the remains of two several
creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments
of almost every variety of rock, — basalts, ironstones, hyperstenes, porphy-
ries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist,
had he all Europe before him could hardly choose for himself a better
field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for Geology had
not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had
to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself.
But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that
the facts contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of
years.

In the course of the first day's employment I picked up a nodular mass
of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonder-
ful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture,—
one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed
walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog
lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such
curiosity in the whole world ? I broke open a few other nodules of similar
appearance, — for they lay pretty thickly on the shore, — and found that
there might be. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales
of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated;
in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of
all Nature's riddles, these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting
and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was
told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them, that there was a
part of the shore about two miles farther to the west where curiously-
shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasion-
ally picked up; and that in his father's days the country people called
them thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing
bewitched cattle. Our employer, on quitting the quarry for the building or*

A YOUNG MAN LOOKING AT ROCKS 101

which we were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday- I
employed it in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so
thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied
in even my dreams.

What first attracted my notice was a detached group of low-lying
skerries, wholly different in form and colour from the sandstone cliffs
above or the primary rocks a little farther to the west. I found them com-
posed of thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black
slaty substance, which, as I ascertained in the course of the evening, burns
with a powerful flame, and emits a strong bituminous odour. The layers
into which the beds readily separate are hardly an eighth part of an inch
in thickness, and yet on every layer there are the impressions of thousands
and tens of thousands of the various fossils peculiar to the Lias. We may
turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a
herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every
page: scallops, and gryphites, and ammonites, of almost every variety
peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight of ten varieties of
belemnite; twigs of wood, leaves of plants, cones of an extinct species of
pine, bits of charcoal, and the scales of fishes; and, as if to render their
pictorial appearance more striking, though the leaves of this interesting
volume are of a deep black, most of the impressions are of a chalky white-
ness. I was lost in admiration and astonishment, and found my very
imagination paralysed by an assemblage of wonders that seemed to out-
rival in the fantastic and the extravagant even its wildest conceptions. I
passed on from ledge to ledge, like the traveller of the tale through the
city of statues, and at length found one of the supposed aerolites I had
come in quest of firmly imbedded in a mass of shale. But I had skill
enough to determine that it was other than what it had been deemed.
A very near relative, who had been a sailor in his time on almost every
ocean, and had visited almost every quarter of the globe, had brought
home one of these meteoric stones with him from the coast of Java. It
was of a cylindrical shape and vitreous texture, and it seemed to have
parted in the middle when in a half-molten state, and to have united
again, somewhat awry, ere it had cooled enough to have lost the adhesive
quality. But there was nothing organic in its structure; whereas the stone
I had now found was organized very curiously indeed. It was of a coni-
cal form and filamentary texture, the filaments radiating in straight lines
from the centre to the circumference. Finely-marked veins like white
threads ran transversely through these in its upper half to the point; while
the space below was occupied by an internal cone, formed of plates that
lay parallel to the base, and which, like watch-glasses, were concave on the

102 THE EARTH

under side and convex on the upper. I learned in time to call this stone
a belemnite, and became acquainted with enough of its history to know
that it once formed part of a variety of cuttle-fish, long since extinct.

My first year of labour came to a close, and I found that the amount
of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My
knowledge, too, had increased in more than the skill of at least the com-
mon mechanic, I had fitted myself for independence. The additional
experience of twenty years has not shown me that there is any necessary
connection between a life of toil and a life of wretchedness; and when I
have found good men anticipating a better and a happier time than
either the present or the past, the conviction that in every period of the
world's history the great bulk of mankind must pass their days in labour,
has not in the least inclined me to scepticism. . . .

One important truth I would fain press on the attention of my low-
lier readers: there are few professions, however humble, that do not pre-
sent their peculiar advantages of observation; there are none, I repeat,
in which the exercise of the faculties does not lead to enjoyment. I
advise the stone-mason, for instance, to acquaint himself with Geology.
Much of his time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely-
separated localities. The bridge or harbour is no sooner completed in one
district than he has to remove to where the gentleman's seat or farm-
steading is to be erected in another; and so, in the course of a few years,
he may pass over the whole geological scale, even when restricted to Scot-
land, from the Grauwacke of the Lammermuirs, to the Wealden of
Moray or the Chalk-flints of Banffshire and Aberdeen; and this, too,
with opportunities of observation at every stage which can be shared with
him by only the gentleman of fortune who devotes his whole time to the
study. Nay, in some respects his advantages are superior to those of the
amateur himself. The latter must often pronounce a formation unfossilif-
erous when, after the examination of at most a few days, he discovers ir
it nothing organic; and it will be found that half the mistakes of geolo-
gists have arisen from conclusions thus hastily formed. But the working
man, whose employments have to be carried on in the same formation for
months, perhaps years, together, enjoys better opportunities for arriving
at just decisions. There are, besides, a thousand varieties of accident which
lead to discovery, — floods, storms, landslips, tides of unusual height, ebbs
of extraordinary fall; and the man who plies his labour at all seasons in
the open air has by much the best chance of profiting by these. There
are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer, and
the proofs which establish their place in the geological scale more tardily
.still. I was acquainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 103

for nearly ten years ere I had ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous, —
a discovery which, in exploring this formation in those localities, some of
our first geologists had failed to anticipate: I was acquainted with it for
nearly ten years more ere I could assign to its fossils their exact place in
the scale.

. . . Should the working man be encouraged by my modicum of success
to improve his opportunities of observation, I shall have accomplished the
whole of it. It cannot be too extensively known, that nature is vast and
knowledge limited, and that no individual, however humble in place
or acquirement, need despair of adding to the general fund.

1841

Geological Change

SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKE

IT WAS A FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE OF HUTTON
[James Hutton, 1726-1797] and his school that this globe has not
always worn the aspect which it bears at present; that on the contrary,
proofs may everywhere be culled that the land which we now see has
been formed out of the wreck of an older land. Among these proofs, the
most obvious are supplied by some of the more' familiar kinds of rocks,
which teach us that, though they are now portions of the dry land, they
were originally sheets of gravel, sand, and mud, which had been worn
from the face of long-vanished continents, and after being spread out
over the floor of the sea were consolidated into compact stone, and
were finally broken up and raised once more to form part of the dry
land. This cycle of change involved two great systems of natural proc-
esses. On the one hand, men were taught that by the action of running
water the materials of the solid land are in a state of continual decay and
transport to the ocean. On the other hand, the ocean floor is liable from
time to time to be upheaved by some stupendous internal force akin

104 THE EARTH

to that which gives rise to the volcano and the earthquake. Hutton
further perceived that not only had the consolidated materials been dis-
rupted and elevated, but that masses of molten rock had been thrust
upward among them, and had cooled and crystallized in large bodies
of granite and other eruptive rocks which form so prominent a feature
on the earth's surface.

It was a special characteristic of this philosophical system that it sought
in the changes now in progress on the earth's surface an explanation of
those which occurred in older times. Its founder refused to invent causes
or modes of operation, for those with which he was familiar seemed to
him adequate to solve the problems with which he attempted to deal.
Nowhere was the profoundness of his insight more astonishing than in
the clear, definite way in which he proclaimed and reiterated his doc-
trine, that every part of the surface of the continents, from mountain
top to seashore, is continually undergoing decay, and is thus slowly
travelling to the sea. He saw that no sooner will the sea floor be elevated
into new land than it must necessarily become a prey to this universal
and unceasing degradation. He perceived that as the transport of dis-
integrated material is carried on chiefly by running water, rivers must
slowly dig out for themselves the channels in which they flow, and thus
that a system of valleys, radiating from the water parting of a country,
must necessarily result from the descent of the streams from the moun-
tain crests to the sea. He discerned that this ceaseless and wide-spread
decay would eventually lead to the entire demolition of the dry land, but
he contended that from time to time this catastrophe is prevented by the
operation of the under-ground forces, whereby new continents are up-
heaved from the bed of the ocean. And thus in his system a due
proportion is maintained between land and water, and the condition of
the earth as a habitable globe is preserved.

A theory of the earth so simple in outline, so bold in conception, so
full of suggestion, and resting on so broad a base of observation and
reflection, ought (we think) to have commanded at once the attention
of men of science, even if it did not immediately awaken the interest
of the outside world; but, as Playfair sorrowfully admitted, it attracted
notice only very slowly, and several years elapsed before any one showed
himself publicly concerned about it, either as an enemy or a friend.
Some of its earliest critics assailed it for what they asserted to be its
irreligious tendency, — an accusation which Hutton repudiated with much
warmth. The sneer levelled by Cowper a few years earlier at all inquiries
into the history of the universe was perfectly natural and intelligible from
that poer's point of view. There was then a wide-spread belief that this

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 105

world came into existence some six thousand years ago, and that any
attempt greatly to increase that antiquity was meant as a blow to the
authority of Holy Writ. So far, however, from aiming at the overthrow
o£ orthodox beliefs, Hutton evidently regarded his "Theory" as an
important contribution in aid of natural religion. He dwelt with
unfeigned pleasure on the multitude of proofs which he was able to
accumulate of an orderly design in the operations of Nature, decay and
renovation being so nicely balanced as to maintain the habitable con-
dition of the planet. But as he refused to admit the predominance of
violent action in terrestrial changes, and on the contrary contended for
the efficacy of the quiet, continuous processes which we can even now
see at work around us, he was constrained to require an unlimited
duration of past time for the production of those revolutions of which
he perceived such clear and abundant proofs in the crust of the earth.
The general public, however, failed to comprehend that the doctrine of
the high antiquity of the globe was not inconsistent with the com-
paratively recent appearance of man, — a distinction which seems so
obvious now.

Hutton died in 1797, beloved and regretted by the circle of friends
who had learned to appreciate his estimable character and to admire his
genius, but with little recognition from the world at large. Men knew
not then that a great master had passed away from their midst, who
had laid broad and deep the foundations of a new science; that his name
would become a household word in after generations, and that pilgrims
would come from distant lands to visit the scenes from which he drew
his inspiration. . . .

Clear as was the insight and sagacious the inferences of the great
masters [of the Edinburgh school] in regard to the history of the globe,
their vision was necessarily limited by the comparatively narrow range
of ascertained fact which up to their time had been established. They
taught men to recognize that the present world is built of the ruins of
an earlier one, and they explained with admirable perspicacity the oper-
ation of the processes whereby the degradation and renovation of land
are brought about. But they never dreamed that a long and orderly series
of such successive destructions and renewals had taken place and had
left their records in the crust of the earth. They never imagined that
from these records it would be possible to establish a determinate
chronology that could be read everywhere and applied to the elucidation
of the remotest quarter of the globe. It was by the memorable observa-
tions and generalizations of William Smith that this vast extension of
our knowledge of the past history of the earth became possible. While

106 THE EARTH

the Scottish philosophers were building up their theory here, Smith was
quietly ascertaining by extended journeys that the stratified rocks of the
west of England occur in a definite sequence, and that each well-marked
group of them can be discriminated from the others and identified across
the country by means of its inclosed organic remains. It is nearly a hun-
dred years since he made known his views, so that by a curious coin-
cidence we may fitly celebrate on this occasion the centenary of William
Smith as well as that of James Hutton. No single discovery has ever had
a more momentous and far-reaching influence on the progress of a
science than that law of organic succession which Smith established. At
first it served merely to determine the order of the stratified rocks of
England. But it soon proved to possess a world-wide value, for it was
found to furnish the key to the structure of the whole stratified crust
of the earth. It showed that within that crust lie the chronicles of a long
history of plant and animal life upon this planet, it supplied the means
of arranging the materials for this history in true chronological sequence,
and it thus opened out a magnificent vista through a vast series of ages,
each marked by its own distinctive types of organic life, which, in pro-
portion to their antiquity, departed more and more from the aspect of the
living world.

Thus a hundred years ago, by the brilliant theory of Hutton and the
fruitful generalization of Smith, the study of the earth received in our
country the impetus which has given birth to the modern science of
geology. . . .

From the earliest times the natural features of the earth's surface have
arrested the attention of mankind. The rugged mountain, the cleft ravine,
the scarped cliff, the solitary bowlder, have stimulated curiosity and
prompted many a speculation as to their origin. The shells embedded by
millions in the solid rocks of hills far removed from the seas have still
further pressed home these "obstinate questionings." But for many long
centuries the advance of inquiry into such matters was arrested by the
paramount influence of orthodox theology. It was not merely that the
church opposed itself to the simple and obvious interpretation of these
natural phenomena. So implicit had faith become in the accepted views
of the earth's age and of the history of creation, that even laymen of
intelligence and learning set themselves unbidden and in perfect good
faith to explain away the difficulties which nature so persistently raised
up, and to reconcile her teachings with those of the theologians. . . .

It is the special glory of the Edinburgh school of geology to have cast
aside all this fanciful trifling. Hutton boldly proclaimed that it was no
part of his philosophy to account for the beginning of things. His con-

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 107

cern lay only with the evidence furnished by the earth itself as to its
origin. With the intuition of true genius he early perceived that the only
basis from which to explore what has taken place in bygone time is a
knowledge of what is taking place to-day. He thus founded his system
upon a careful study of the process whereby geological changes are now
brought about. . . .

Fresh life was now breathed into the study of the earth. A new spirit
seemed to animate the advance along every pathway of inquiry. Facts
that had long been familiar came to possess a wider and deeper meaning
when their connection with each other was recognized as parts of one
great harmonious system of continuous change. In no department of
Nature, for example, was this broader vision more remarkably displayed
than in that wherein the circulation of water between land and sea plays
the most conspicuous part. From the earliest times men had watched the
coming of clouds, the fall of rain, the flow of rivers, and had recognized
that on this nicely adjusted machinery the beauty and fertility of the land
depend. But they now learned that this beauty and fertility involve a
continual decay of the terrestrial surface; that the soil is a measure of this
decay, and would cease to afford us maintenance were it not continually
removed and renewed, that through the ceaseless transport of soil by
rivers to the sea the face of the land is slowly lowered in level and carved
into mountain and valley, and that the materials thus borne outwards to
the floor of the ocean are not lost, but accumulate there to form rocks,
which in the end will be upraised into new lands. Decay and renovation,
in well-balanced proportions, were thus shown to be the system on which
the existence of the earth as a habitable globe had been established. It
was impossible to conceive that the economy of the planet could be main-
tained on any other basis. Without the circulation of water the life of
plants and animals would be impossible, and with the circulation the
decay of the surface of the; land and the renovation of its disintegrated
materials are necessarily involved.

As it is now, so must it have been in past time. Hutton and Playfair
pointed to the stratified rocks of the earth's crust as demonstrations that
the same processes which are at work to-day have been in operation from
a remote antiquity. . . .

Obviously, however, human experience, in the few centuries during
which attention has been turned to such subjects, has been too brief to
warrant any dogmatic assumption that the various natural processes
must have been carried on in the past with the same energy and at the
same rate as they are carried on now. ... It was an error to take for
granted that no other kind of process or influence, nor any variation in

108 THE EARTH

the rate of activity save those of which man has had actual cognizance,
has played a part in the terrestrial economy. The uniformitarian writers
laid themselves open to the charge of maintaining a kind of perpetual
motion in the machinery of Nature. They could find in the records of the
earth's history no evidence of a beginning, no prospect of an end. . . .

The discoveries of William Smith, had they been adequately under-
stood, would have been seen to offer a corrective to this rigidly uni-
formitarian conception, for they revealed that the crust of the earth con-
tains the long record of an unmistakable order of progression in organic
types. They proved that plants and animals have varied widely in suc-
cessive periods of the earth's history; the present condition of organic
life being only the latest phase of a long preceding series, each stage of
which recedes further from the existing aspect of things as we trace it
backward into the past. And though no relic had yet been found, or
indeed was ever likely to be found, of the first living things that appeared
upon the earth's surface, the manifest simplification of types in the
older formations pointed irresistibly to some beginning from which the
long procession has taken its start. If then it could thus be demonstrated
that there had been upon the globe an orderly march of living forms
from the lowliest grades in early times to man himself to-day, and thus
that in one department of her domain, extending through the greater
portion of the records of the earth's history, Nature had not been
uniform, but had followed a vast and noble plan of evolution, surely it
might have been expected that those who discovered and made known
this plan would seek to ascertain whether some analogous physical pro-
gression from a definite beginning might not be discernible in the frame-
work of the globe itself.

But the early masters of the science labored under two great disad-
vantages. In the first place, they found the oldest records of the earth's
history so broken up and effaced as to be no longer legible. And in the
second place, . . . they considered themselves bound to search for facts,
not to build up theories; and as in the crust of the earth they could find
no facts which threw any light upon the primeval constitution and sub-
sequent development of our planet, they shut their ears to any theoretical
interpretations that might be offered from other departments of science. . . .

What the more extreme members of the uniformitarian school failed
to perceive was the absence of all evidence that terrestrial catastrophes
even on a colossal scale might not be a part of the present economy of
this globe. Such occurrences might never seriously affect the whole
earth at one time, and might return at such wide intervals that no
example of them has yet been chronicled by man. But that they have

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 109

occurred again and again, and even within comparatively recent geolog-
ical times, hardly admits of serious doubt. . . .

As the most recent and best known of these great transformations, the
Ice Age stands out conspicuously before us. ... There can not be any
doubt that after man had become a denizen of the earth, a great physical
change came over the Northern hemisphere. The climate, which had
previously been so mild that evergreen trees flourished within ten or
twelve degrees of the North Pole, now became so severe that vast sheets
of snow and ice covered the north of Europe and crept southward beyond
the south coast of Ireland, almost as far as the southern shores of
England, and across the Baltic into France and Germany. This Arctic
transformation was not an episode that lasted merely a few seasons, and
left the land to resume thereafter its ancient aspect. With various suc-
cessive fluctuations it must have endured for many thousands of years.
When it began to disappear it probably faded away as slowly and
imperceptibly as it had advanced, and when it finally vanished it left
Europe and North America profoundly changed in the character alike
of their scenery and of their inhabitants. The rugged rocky contours of
earlier times were ground smooth and polished by the march of the ice
across them, while the lower grounds were buried under wide and thick
sheets of clay, gravel, and sand, left behind by the melting ice. The
varied and abundant flora which had spread so far within the Arctic
circle was driven away into more southern and less ungenial climes.
But most memorable of all was the extirpation of the prominent large
animals which, before the advent of the ice, had roamed over Europe.
The lions, hyenas, wild horses, hippopotamuses, and other creatures
either became entirely extinct or were driven into the Mediterranean
basin and into Africa. In their place came northern forms — the reindeer,
glutton, musk ox, wooly rhinoceros, and mammoth.

Such a marvellous transformation in climate, in scenery, in vegetation
and in inhabitants, within what was after all but a brief portion of
geological time, though it may have involved no sudden or violent con-
vulsion, is surely entitled to rank as a catastrophe in the history of the
globe. It was probably brought about mainly if not entirely by the oper-
ation of forces external to the earth. No similar calamity having befallen
the continents within the time during which man has been recording his
experience, the Ice Age might be cited as a contradiction to the doc-
trine of uniformity. And yet it manifestly arrived as part of the estab-
lished order of Nature. Whether or not we grant that other ice ages
preceded the last great one, we must admit that the conditions under
which it arose, so far as we know them, might conceivably have occurred

110 THE EARTH

before and may occur again. The various agencies called into play by the
extensive refrigeration of the Northern hemisphere were not different from
those with which we are familiar. Snow fell and glaciers crept as they
do to-day. Ice scored and polished rocks exactly as it still does among
the Alps and in Norway. There was nothing abnormal in the phenomena,
save the scale on which they were manifested. And thus, taking a broad
view of the whole subject, we recognize the catastrophe, while at the
same time we see in its progress the operation of those same natural
processes which we know to be integral parts of the machinery whereby
the surface of the earth is continually transformed.

Among the debts which science owes to the Huttonian school, not the
least memorable is the promulgation of the first well-founded con-
ceptions of the high antiquity of the globe. Some six thousand years had
previously been believed to comprise the whole life of the planet, and
indeed of the entire universe. When the curtain was then first raised
that had veiled the history of the earth, and men, looking beyond the
brief span within which they had supposed that history to have been
transacted, beheld the records of a long vista of ages stretching far away
into a dim illimitable past, the prospect vividly impressed their imagina-
tion. Astronomy had made known the immeasurable fields of space; the
new science of geology seemed now to reveal boundless distances of
time. . . .

The universal degradation of the land, so notable a characteristic of
the earth's surface, has been regarded as an extremely slow process.
Though it goes on without ceasing, yet from century to century it seems
to leave hardly any perceptible trace on the landscapes of a country.
Mountains and plains, hills and valleys appear to wear the same familiar
aspect which is indicated in the oldest pages of history. This obvious
slowness in one of the most important departments of geological activity
doubtless contributed in large measure to form and foster a vague belief
in the vastness of the antiquity required for the evolution of the earth.

But, as geologists eventually came to perceive, the rate of degradation
of the land is capable of actual measurement. The amount of material
worn away from the surface of any drainage basin and carried in the
form of mud, sand, or gravel, by the main river into the sea represents
the extent to which that surface has been lowered by waste in any given
period of time. But denudation and deposition must be equivalent to
each other. As much material must be laid down in sedimentary accumu-
lations as has been mechanically removed, so that in measuring the
annual bulk of sediment borne into the sea by a river, we obtain a clue

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 111

not only to the rate of denudation of the land, but also to the rate at
which the deposition of new sedimentary formations takes place. . . .

But in actual fact the testimony in favor of the slow accumulation and
high antiquity of the geological record is much stronger than might be
inferred from the mere thickness of the stratified formations. These
sedimentary deposits have not been laid down in one unbroken sequence,
but have had their continuity interrupted again and again by upheaval
and depression. So fragmentary are they in some regions that we can
easily demonstrate the length of time represented there by still existing
sedimentary strata to be vastly less than the time indicated by the gaps in
the series.

There is yet a further and impressive body of evidence furnished by
the successive races of plants and animals which have lived upon the
earth and have left their remains sealed up within its rocky crust. No
universal destructions of organic life are chronicled in the stratified rocks.
It is everywhere admitted that, from the remotest times up to the pres-
ent day, there has been an onward march of development, type succeed-
ing type in one long continuous progression. As to the rate of this evolu-
tion precise data are wanting. There is, however, the important negative
argument furnished by the absence of evidence of recognizable specific
variations of organic forms since man began to observe and record. We
know that within human experience a few species have become extinct,
but there is no conclusive proof that a single new species have come into
existence, nor are appreciable variations readily apparent in forms that
live in a wild state. The seeds and plants found with Egyptian mummies,
and the flowers and fruits depicted on Egyptian tombs, are easily identi-
fied with the vegetation of modern Egypt. The embalmed bodies of
animals found in that country show no sensible divergence from the
structure or proportions of the same animals at the present day. The
human races of Northern Africa and Western Asia were already as
distinct when portrayed by the ancient Egyptian artists as they are now,
and they do not seem to have undergone any perceptible change since
then. Thus a lapse of four or five thousand years has not been accom-
panied by any recognizable variation in such forms of plant and animal
life as can be tendered in evidence. Absence of sensible change in these
instances is, of course, no proof that considerable alteration may not have
been accomplished in other forms more exposed to vicissitudes of
climate and other external influences. But it furnishes at least a presump-
tion in favor of the extremely tardy progress of organic variation.

If, however, we extend our vision beyond the narrow range of human
history, and look at the remains of the plants and animals preserved in

112 THE EARTH

those younger formations which, though recent when regarded as parts
of the whole geological record, must be many thousands of years older
than the very oldest of human monuments, we encounter the most
impressive proofs of the persistence of specific forms. Shells which lived
in our seas before the coming of the Ice Age present the very same
peculiarities of form, structure, and ornament which their descendants
still possess. The lapse of so enormous an interval of time has not
sufficed seriously to modify them. So too with the plants and the higher
animals which still survive. Some forms have become extinct, but few
or none which remain display any transitional gradations into new
species. We must admit that such transitions have occurred, that indeed
they have been in progress ever since organized existence began upon
our planet, and are doubtless taking place now. But we can not detect
them on the way, and we feel constrained to believe that their march
must be excessively slow. . . .

If the many thousands of years which have elapsed since the Ice Age
have produced no appreciable modification of surviving plants and
animals, how vast a period must have been required for that marvellous
scheme of organic development which is chronicled in the rocks! . . .

I have reserved for final consideration a branch of the history of the
earth which, while it has become, within the lifetime of the present
generation, one of the most interesting and fascinating departments of
geological inquiry, owed its first impulse to the far-seeing intellects of
Hutton and Playfair. With the penetration of genius these illustrious
teachers perceived that if the broad masses of land and the great chains
of mountains owe their origin to stupendous movements which from
time to time have convulsed the earth, their details of contour must be
mainly due to the eroding power of running water. They recognized
that as the surface of the land is continually worn down, it is essentially
by a process of sculpture that the physiognomy of every country has been
developed, valleys being hollowed out and hills left standing, and that
these inequalities in topographical detail are only varying and local
accidents in the progress of the one great process of the degradation of
the land.

From the broad and guiding outlines of theory thus sketched we
have now advanced amid ever-widening multiplicity of detail into a
fuller and nobler conception of the origin of scenery. The law of evolu-
tion is written as legibly on the landscapes of the earth as on any other
page of the book of Nature. Not only do we recognize that the existing
topography of the continents, instead of being primeval in origin, has
gradually been developed after many precedent mutations, but we are

GEOLOGICAL CHANGE 113

enabled to trace these earlier revolutions in the structure of every hill
and glen. Each mountain chain is thus found to be a memorial of many
successive stages in geographical evolution. Within certain limits land and
sea have changed places again and again. Volcanoes have broken out
and have become extinct in many countries long before the advent of
man. Whole tribes of plants and animals have meanwhile come and
gone, and in leaving their remains behind them as monuments at once
of the slow development of organic types, and of the prolonged vicissi-
tudes of the terrestrial surface, have furnished materials for a chrono-
logical arrangement of the earth's topographical features. Nor is it only
from the organisms of former epochs that broad generalizations may be
drawn regarding revolutions in geography. The living plants and animals
of to-day have been discovered to be eloquent of ancient geographical
features that have long since vanished. In their distribution they tell us
that climates have changed; that islands have been disjoined from con-
tinents; that oceans once united have been divided from each other, or
once separate have now been joined; that some tracts of land have
disappeared, while others for prolonged periods of time have remained
in isolation. The present and the past are thus linked together, not
merely by dead matter, but by the world of living things, into one vast
system of continuous progression.

1892

Earthquakes — What Are They?

THE REVEREND JAMES B. MACELWANE, S.J.

K)UND ABOUT THIS EARTH OF OURS THERE RUN
certain belts in which earthquakes occur more often than in other
parts of the world. Why should this be the case? We read from time to
time of destructive earthquakes in Japan. But many lesser shocks occur there
of which we never hear. In fact, there is an earthquake, large or small,
somewhere in Japan practically every day. Similarly, the Kurile Islands,
the Aleutian Islands, Alaska and the Queen Charlotte Islands are subject
to frequent earth shocks. Continuing around the Pacific circle, we meet
with many earthquakes in California, Mexico, Central America, Vene-
zuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Chili. And on the other
side of the Pacific Ocean, the earthquake belt continues from Japan
southward through Formosa and the Philippine Deep to New Zealand.
Another somewhat less striking earthquake zone runs from Mexico and
the Antilles through the northern Mediterranean countries and Asia
Minor into the Pamirs, Turkestan, Assam and the Indian Ocean. In other
parts of the earth, destructive earthquakes also occur, but as more or less
isolated phenomena. Examples in this country are the Mississippi Valley
earthquakes of 1811 and of the following year, and the Charleston earth-
quake of 1886.

Now why should destructive earthquakes occur more frequently in
such a zone or belt as the border of the Pacific Ocean? What is an
earthquake? Centuries ago, many people, and even scientific men,
thought that earthquakes were caused by explosions down in the earth;
and there have not been wanting men in our own time who held this
view. Others, like Alexander von Humboldt, thought that earthquakes
were connected with volcanoes; that the earth is a ball of molten lava
covered by a thin shell of rock and that the volcanoes were a sort of
safety valve. As long as the volcanoes are active, they said, the pressure
within the molten lava of the earth is held down, but when the volcanoes

114

EARTHQUAKES—WHAT ARE THEY? 115

cease their activity, thus closing the safety valves, so to speak, the increas-
ing pressure eventually causes a fracture in the earth's crust. Another
theory supposed that the lava occupied passageways in a more or less
solid portion of the earth underneath the crust and that the movement of
lava within these passages caused such pressure as to burst their walls,
thus causing an earthquake.

Quite a different point of view was taken by those who held the theory
that earthquakes occurred within the uppermost crust of the earth. This
crust was supposed to be honeycombed with vast caves. Even the whole
mountain chain of the Alps was thought to be an immense arch built
up over a cavern. When the arch should break, thus allowing the overly-
ing rocks to drop somewhat, we would have an earthquake. In many
cases, those who held this theory believed that the entire roof would
collapse and that earthquakes are generally due to the impact of the
falling mass of rocks on the floor of the cavern.

But it has been shown, since the discovery of the passage of earthquake
waves through the earth and their registration by means of seismographs,
that the outer portion of the earth down to a depth of at least five
elevenths of the earth's radius is not only solid, but, with the exception of
the outer layers, is more than twice as rigid as steel in the laboratory.
It has also been shown that volcanoes are a purely surface phenomenon;
that they have no connection with each other, even when they are but
a few miles apart. Hence it is clear that earthquakes connected with
volcanoes must be of very local character, if they are to be caused by the
movement of lava. This is found to be actually the case. It is also clear
that some other cause must operate in producing earthquakes, since
destructive earthquakes often occur very far from volcanoes. In fact,
some regions where there are frequent earthquakes have no volcanoes
at all.

In the California earthquake of 1906, there occurred a fracture of the
earth's crust which could be followed at the surface for a distance of
more than 150 miles, extending from the Gualala River Valley on the
northern coast of California southeastward through Tomales Bay and
outside the Golden Gate to the old mission of San Juan Bautista. The
rocks on the east side of this fracture moved southeastward relatively to
those on the west side, so that every road, fence or other structure which
had been built across the line of fracture was offset by varying amounts
up to twenty-one feet. A study of this earthquake led scientific men to the
conclusion that the mechanism of the earthquake was an elastic rebound.
It was thought that the rocks in the portion of the earth's crust west of
the fracture had been draped northward until the ultimate strength of

116 THE EARTH

the rocks was reached along this zone of weakness. When the fracture
occurred, the rocks, like bent springs, sprang back to an unstrained
position. But this did not occur in one continuous throw, but in a series
of jerks, each of which set up elastic vibrations in the rocks. These
vibrations traveled out in all directions and constituted the earthquake
proper. The zone of weakness in which the California earthquake
occurred is a valley known as the San Andreas rift. It is usually quite
straight and ignores entirely the physiography of the region, passing
indifferently over lowlands and mountains and extending more than 300
miles beyond the end of the fracture of 1906 until it is lost in the Colorado
desert east of San Bernardino. The entire floor of the valley has been
broken up by earthquakes occurring through the ages into small blocks
and ridges and even into rock flour.

The San Andreas rift is only one of the many features which parallel
the Pacific Coast in California. There are other lesser rifts on which
earthquakes have occurred. Similar to these rifts in some respects are
the ocean deeps, along the walls of which occur some of the world's
most violent earthquakes.

Why do these features parallel the Pacific shore? And why are earth-
quakes associated with them? Both seem to be connected in some way
with the process of mountain-building, for many of the features in this
circum-Pacific belt are geologically recent. Many have thought that
mountain-building in general and the processes going on around the
Pacific in particular are due to a shortening of the earth's crust caused by
gradual cooling of the interior and the consequent shrinkage, but this
is not evident. While the earth is surely losing heat by radiation into
space, it is being heated by physical and chemical processes connected
with radioactivity at such a rate that, unless the radioactive minerals are
confined to the uppermost ten miles or so of the earth's crust, the earth
must be getting hotter instead of cooler, because the amount of heat
generated must exceed that which is conducted to the surface and radiated
away.

Another suggested cause of earthquakes is isostatic compensation. If
we take a column of rock extending downward from the top of a moun-
tain chain to a given level within the earth's crust and compare it with
another column extending to the same level under a plain, the mountain
column will be considerably longer than the other and consequently will
contain more rock. Hence it should weigh more, unless the rocks of which
it is composed are lighter than those under the plain, but geodesists tell
us that the two columns weigh the same. Hence the rocks under the
plain must be the heavier of the two. But even if this is the case, we

EARTHQUAKES— WHAT ARE THEY? 117

should expect the conditions to change; for rain and weather are continu-
ally removing rocks from the tops of the mountains and distributing the
materials of which they are composed over the plain. Nevertheless,
according to the geodesists, the columns continue to weigh the same.
Hence we must conclude that compensation in some form must be taking
place. There must be an inflow of rock into the mountain column and
an outflow from the plain column. But the cold flow of a portion of a
mass of rock must place enormous strain on the surrounding portions.
When the stress reaches the ultimate strength of the rocks, there must be
fracture and a relief of strain, thus causing an earthquake.

It has recently been found that earthquakes occur at considerable depth
in the earth. Hence they can not be caused by purely surface strains.
There are a few earthquakes which seem to have occurred at depths
up to 300 miles. This is far below the depth of compensation of the
geodesists. It is also below the zone of fracture of the geologists, and far
down in what they call the zone of flow. Can an earthquake be generated
by a simple regional flow? We do not know, but it would seem that
sudden release of strain is necessary to cause the vibrations which we
call an earthquake. It may be that a strain is produced and gradually
grows in such a way as to produce planes of shear such as occur when
a column is compressed lengthwise. These planes of maximum shear
usually form an angle of about forty-five degrees with the direction of
the force. Recent investigation into the failure of steel indicates that under
certain conditions it will retain its full strength up to the moment of
failure when the steel becomes as plastic as mud along the planes of
maximum shear. The two portions of the column then glide over each
other on the plastic zone until the strain is relieved, whereupon the steel
within the zone becomes hard and rigid as before. It may be that a
process somewhat similar to this may take place deep down in the earth,
and that the sheared surface may be propagated upwards through the
zone of flow to the zone of fracture and even to the surface of the earth.
In that case, the plastic shear would give way to true fracture near the
surface.

It is only by a careful study, not only of the waves produced by earth-
quakes and of the permanent displacements which occur in them, but of
the actual movement along the planes of fracture, that we shall be able
to discover what an earthquake really is. For the present, we must be
satisfied with knowing that it is an elastic process; that it is usually
destructive only within a very restricted belt, and that it is probably
produced by the sudden release of a regional strain within the crust of
the earth.

Last Days of St. Pierre

FAIRFAX DOWNEY

From Disaster Fighters

THE PLANTER

TJTOW GRACIOUSLY HAD FORTUNE SMILED ON FERNAND

JL JL Clerc. Little past the age of forty, in this year of 1902, he was the
leading planter of the fair island of Martinique. Sugar from his broad
cane fields, molasses, and mellow rum had made him a man of wealth,
a millionaire. All his enterprises prospered.

Were the West Indies, for all their beauty and their bounty, sometimes
powerless to prevent a sense of exile, an ache of homesickness in the
heart of a citizen of the Republic? Then there again fate had been kind
to Fernand Clerc. Elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies, it was
periodically his duty and his pleasure to embark and sail home to attend
its sessions — home to France, to Paris.

Able, respected, good-looking, blessed with a charming wife and
children, M. Clerc found life good indeed. With energy undepleted by
the tropics, he rode through the island visiting his properties. Tall and
thick grew the cane stalks of his plantation at Vive on the slopes of
Mont Pelee. Mont Pelee — Naked Mountain — well named when lava
erupting from its cone had stripped it bare of its verdure. But that was
long ago. Not since 1851 had its subterranean fires flared up and then
but insignificantly. Peaceful now, its crater held the lovely Lake of
Palms, whose wooded shores were a favorite picnic spot for parties from
St. Pierre and Fort-de-France. Who need fear towering Mont Pelee, once
mighty, now mild, an extinct volcano?

Yet this spring M. Clerc and all Martinique received a rude shock.
The mountain was not dead, it seemed. White vapors veiled her sum-
mit, and by May 2nd she had overlaid her green mantle with a gown

118

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE 119

of gray cinders. Pelee muttered and fumed like an angry woman told
her day was long past. Black smoke poured forth, illumined at night by
jets of flame and flashes of lightning. The grayish snow of cinders covered
the countryside, and the milky waters of the Riviere Blanche altered into
a muddy and menacing torrent.

Nor was Pelee uttering only empty threats. On May 5th, M. Clerc at
Vive beheld a cloud rolling from the mountain down the valley. Sparing
his own acres, the cloud and the stream of smoking lava which it masked,
enveloped the Guerin sugar factory, burying its owner, his wife, over-
seer, and twenty-five workmen and domestics.

Dismayed by this tragedy, M. Clerc and many others moved from the
slopes into St. Pierre. The city was crowded, its population of 25,000
swollen to 40,000, and the throngs that filled the market and the cafes
or strolled through the gorgeously luxuriant Jardin des Plantes lent an
air of added animation, of almost hectic gaiety. When M. Clerc professed
alarm at the behavior of Pelee to his friends, he was answered with
shrugs of shoulders. Danger? On the slopes perhaps, but scarcely here in
St. Pierre down by the sea.

Thunderous, scintillant, Mont Pelee staged a magnificent display of
natural fireworks on the night of May 7th. Whites and negroes stared up
at it, fascinated. Some were frightened but more took a child-like joy
in the vivid spectacle. It was as if the old volcano were celebrating the
advent of tomorrow's fete day.

M. Fernand Clerc did not sleep well that night. He breakfasted early
in the household where he and his family were guests and again expressed
his apprehensions to the large group of friends and relatives gathered
at the table. Politely and deferentially — for one does not jeer a personage
and man of proven courage — they heard him out, hiding their scepticism.

The voice of the planter halted in mid-sentence; and he half rose, his
eyes fixed on the barometer. Its needle was actually fluttering!

M. Clerc pushed back his chair abruptly and commanded his carriage
at once. A meaning look to his wife and four children, and they hastened
to make ready. Their hosts and the rest followed them to the door. Nonf
merely none would join their exodus. Au revoir. A demain.

From the balcony of their home, the American Consul, Thomas
Prentis, and his wife waved to the Clerc family driving by. "Stop," the
planter ordered and the carriage pulled up. Best come along, the planter
urged. His American friends thanked him. There was no danger, they
laughed, and waved again to the carriage disappearing in gray dust as
racing hoofs and wheels sped it out of the city of St. Pierre.

120 THE EARTH

THE GOVERNOR

Governor Mouttet, ruling Martinique for the Republic of France,
glared up at rebellious Mont Pelee. This peste of a volcano was deranging
the island. There had been no such crisis since its captures by the English,
who always relinquished it again to France, or the days when the slaves
revolted. A great pity that circumstances beyond his control should dam-
age the prosperous record of his administration, the Governor reflected.

That miserable mountain was disrupting commerce. Its rumblings
drowned out the band concerts in the Savane. Its pyrotechnics distracted
glances which might far better have dwelt admiringly on the proverbial
beauty of the women of Martinique. . . . Now attention was diverted to a
cruder work of Nature, a sputtering volcano. Parbleul It was enough
to scandalize any true Frenchman.

Governor Mouttet sighed and pored over the reports laid before him.
He had appointed a commission to study the eruption and get at the
bottom of I'affaire Pelee, but meanwhile alarm was spreading. People
were fleeing the countryside and thronging into St. Pierre, deserting that
city for Fort-de-France, planning even to leave the island. Steamship
passage was in heavy demand. The Roraima, due May 8th, was booked
solid out of St. Pierre, one said. This would never do. Steps must be
taken to prevent a panic which would scatter fugitives throughout Mar-
tinique or drain a colony of France of its inhabitants.

A detachment of troops was despatched by the Governor to St. Pierre
to preserve order and halt the exodus. His Excellency, no man to send
others where he himself would not venture, followed with Mme. Mouttet
and took up residence in that city. Certainly his presence must serve to
calm these unreasoning, exaggerated fears. He circulated among the
populace, speaking soothing words. Mes enfants, the Governor avowed,
Mont Pelee rumbling away there is only snoring soundly in deep slum-
ber. Be tranquil.

Yet, on the ominous night of May 7th, as spurts of flame painted the
heavens, the Governor privately confessed to inward qualms. What if
the mountain should really rouse? Might it not then cast the mortals at
its feet into a sleep deeper than its own had been, a sleep from which
they would never awaken?

THE CHIEF OFFICER

Ellery S. Scott, chief officer of the Quebec Line steamship Roraima,
stood on the bridge with Captain Muggah as the vessel bore down on
Martinique. A column of smoke over the horizon traced down to the

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE 121

4,500-foot summit of Mont Pelee. So the old volcano was acting up!
Curiosity on the bridge ran high as anchor was dropped in the St. Pierre
roadstead about 6 o'clock on the morning of May 8th. But all seemed well
ashore. The streets, twisting and climbing between the bright-colored
houses, were filled with crowds in gay holiday attire.

Promptly the agents came aboard. The volcano? But certainly it was
erupting and causing inconvenience. But there was no danger, regardless
of the opinion of that Italian skipper yesterday who had said that had
he seen Vesuvius looking like Pelee, he would have departed from
Naples as fast as he was going to leave St. Pierre. Although the authorities
refused him clearance and threatened penalties, he had sailed in haste,
with only half his cargo.

By the way, the agents continued, the passenger list was to be consid-
erably augmented: sixty first-class anxious to leave St. Pierre. Here they
were boarding now with bag and baggage. Could they be humored, and
the Roraima sail for St. Lucia at once, returning to discharge its Mar-
tinique cargo? the agents inquired of Captain Muggah.

Chief Officer Scott, ordered below to inspect the stowage, thought of
his boy in the forecastle. A good lad this eldest son of his. Used to say
he'd have a ship of his own some day and keep on his father as first mate.
No, his father planned a better career than the sea for him. The boy was
slated to go to college and be a lawyer. This would be his last voyage.

Stowed shipshape and proper as Scott knew he would find it, the
cargo plainly could not be shifted without a good deal of difficulty. The
Martinique consignment lay above that for St. Lucia, and it would be
a heavy task to discharge at the latter port first. Scott so reported.

The agents hesitated briefly. To be sure, sixty first-class passengers were
to be obliged if possible but — ah, well, let them wait a little longer. The
Roraima would sail as soon as the upper layer of cargo was landed.

Ship's bells tolled the passing hours. Pelee yonder growled hoarsely and
belched black smoke. A little before 8, Chief Officer Scott apprehensively
turned his binoculars on the summit.

THE PRISONER

It was dark in the underground dungeon of the St. Pierre prison, but
thin rays of light filtered through the grated opening in the upper part
of the cell door. Enough so that Auguste Ciparis could tell when it was
night and when it was day.

Not that it mattered much unless a man desired to count the days
until he should be free. What good was that ? One could not hurry them
by. Therefore Auguste stolidly endured them with the long patience

122 THE EARTH

of Africa. The judge had declared him a criminal and caused him to
be locked up here. Thus it was settled and nothing was to be done. Yet
it was hard, this being shut out of life up there in the gay city — hard
when one was only twenty-five and strong and lusty.

Auguste slept and dozed all he could. Pelee was rumbling away in the
distance — each day the jailer bringing him food and water seemed more
excited about it — but the noise, reaching the subterranean cell only as
faint thunder, failed to keep the negro awake. . . .

Glimmerings of the dawn of May 8th filtered through the grating into
the cell, and Auguste stirred into wakefulness. This being a fete day,
imprisonment was less tolerable. What merriment his friends would be
making up there in the squares of St. Pierre! He could imagine the side-
long glances and the swaying hips of the mulatto girls he might have
been meeting today. Auguste stared sullenly at the cell door. At least the
jailer might have been on time with his breakfast.

The patch of light in the grating winked out into blackness. Ail Ait
All of a sudden it was night again.

On the morning of May 8th, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked on
toward ten minutes of 8 when they would stop forever. Against a back-
ground of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapor rose from the cone of
Mont Pelee.

A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava boiled
to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelee with a terrific
explosion blew its head off.

Like a colossal Roman candle it shot out streaks of flame and fiery
globes. A pall of black smoke rose thousands of feet in the air, darkening
the heavens. Silhouetted by a red, infernal glare, Pelee flung aloft viscid
masses which rained incandescent ashes on land and sea.

Then, jagged and brilliant as the lightning flashes, a fissure opened in
the flank of the mountain toward St. Pierre. Out of it issued an immense
cloud which rushed with unbelievable rapidity down on the doomed city
and the villages of Carbet and Le Precheur.

In three minutes that searing, suffocating cloud enveloped them, and
40,000 people died!

Fernand Clerc, the planter, watched from Mont Parnasse, one mile
east of St. Pierre, where he had so recently breakfasted. Shrouded in such
darkness as only the inmost depths of a cavern afford, he reached out
for the wife and children he could not see and gathered them in blessed
safety into his arms. But the relatives, the many friends he had left s&

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE 123

short a while ago, the American consul and his wife, who had waved him
a gay good-by — them he would never see alive again. . . .

In that vast brazier which was St. Pierre, Governor Mouttet may have
lived the instant long enough to realize that Pelee had in truth awakened
and that eternal sleep was his lot and his wife's and that of all those
whose flight he had discouraged. . . .

Down in that deep dungeon cell of his Auguste Ciparis blinked in the
swift-fallen night. Through the grating blew a current of burning air,
scorching his flesh. He leaped, writhing in agony and screaming for help.
No one answered.

Leaving a blazing city in its wake, the death cloud from the volcano
rolled over the docks, and the sea, hissing and seething, shrank back
before it. Aboard the Roraima, Chief Officer Scott lowered his glasses
precipitately from Pelee. One look at that cloud bearing down like a
whirlwind and he snatched a tarpaulin from a ventilator and pulled it
over him. The ship rolled to port, almost on her beam ends, then back
to starboard. Her funnels and other superstructure and most of her small
boats were swept off by the mighty blast laden with scalding ashes and
stone dust. Badly scorched, Scott emerged from his refuge to catch a
glimpse of the British steamer Roddam plunging by toward the open sea,
her decks a smoking shambles. Of the other sixteen vessels which had
been anchored in the roadstead there was no sign.

Staggering toward the twisted iron wreckage of the bridge, the Chief
Officer beheld the swaying figure of Captain Muggah. From the hideous,
blackened mask that had been his face a voice croaked:

"All hands! Heave up the anchor!"

All hands! Only Scott, two engineers, and a few members of the black
gang who had been below responded. In vain Scott scanned the group for
his son. He never saw the lad again.

The anchor could not be unshackled. "Save the women and children,"
the captain ordered. During attempts to lower a boat, the captain disap-
peared. Later he was pulled out of the water in a dying condition.

Now the Roraima was afire fore and aft. Amid the shrieks and groans
of dying passengers, Scott and three more able-bodied men fought the
flames, helped by a few others whose hands, burned raw, made it torture
to touch anything. Between dousing the fire with bucketfuls from the
sea, Scott tried to give drinks of fresh water to those who begged pitifully
for it, though their seared, swollen throats would not let them swallow a
drop. Tongues lolling, they dragged themselves along the deck, following
him like dogs.

When the French cruiser Suchct steamed up to the rescue, the only

124 THE EARTH

survivors among the passengers were a little girl and her nurse. Twenty-
eight out of a crew of forty-seven were dead.

The eyes of all aboard the Suchet turned toward shore. There at the
foot of a broad, bare pathway, paved by death and destruction down the
slope of Mont Pelee, lay the utter ruins of the city of St. Pierre.

Not until the afternoon of May 8th did the devastation of St. Pierre
cool sufficiently to allow rescuers from Fort-de-France to enter. They
could find none to rescue except one woman who died soon after she
was taken from a cellar.

"St. Pierre, that city this morning alive, full of human souls, is no
morel" Vicar-General Parel wrote his Bishop. "It lies consumed before
us, in its windingsheet of smoke and cinders, silent and desolate, a city
of the dead. We strain our eyes for fleeing inhabitants, for men return-
ing to bury their lost ones. We see no one! There is no living being left
in this desert of desolation, framed in a terrifying solitude. In the back-
ground, when the cloud of smoke and cinders breaks away, the moun-
tain and its slopes, once so green, stand forth like an Alpine landscape.
They look as if they were covered with a heavy cloak of snow, and
through the thickened atmosphere rays of pale sunshine, wan, and
unknown to our latitudes, illumine this scene with a light that seems
to belong to the other side of the grave."

Indeed St. Pierre might have been an ancient town, destroyed in
some half-forgotten cataclysm and recently partly excavated— another
Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cinders, which had buried its streets six
feet deep in a few minutes, were as the dust of centuries. Here was the
same swift extinction Vesuvius had wrought.

Here was no slow flow of lava. That cloud disgorged by Pelee was a
superheated hurricane issuing from the depths of the earth at a speed
of ninety miles an hour. Such was the strength of the blast, it killed
by concussion and by toppling walls on its victims. The fall of the
fourteen-foot metal statue of Notre Dame de la Garde— Our Lady of
Safety— symbolized the dreadful fact that tens of thousands never had a
fighting chance for their lives.

But chiefly the death cloud slew with its lethal content of hot steam
and dust. So swiftly did it pass that its heat did not always burn all of
the light tropical clothing from its prey, but once it was inhaled into
the lungs— that was the end. Some had run a few frantic steps; then
dropped, hands clutched over nose and mouth. Encrusted by cement-
like ashes, corpses lay fixed in the contorted postures of their last struggle

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE 125

replicas of the dead of Vesuvius preserved in the Naples museum. Fire
had charred others or incinerated them to a heap of bones. A horrible
spectacle was presented by bodies whose skulls and abdomens had been
burst by heat and gases.

People who had been indoors when the cloud descended perished
where they stood or sat, but the hand of death had marked most of them
less cruelly. They seemed almost still alive, as each shattered building
disclosed its denouement. There a girl lay prone, her arms about the
feet of an image of the Virgin. A man bent with his head thrust into
a basin from which the water had evaporated. A family was gathered
around a restaurant table. A child held a doll in her arms; when the
doll was touched, it crumbled away except for its china eyes. A clerk
sat at his desk, one hand supporting his chin, the other grasping a pen.
A baker crouched in the fire pit under his oven. In one room of a
home a blonde girl in her bathrobe leaned back in a rocking-chair.
Behind her stood a negro servant who apparently had been combing the
girl's hair. Another servant had crawled under a sofa. Not far away
lay the body of a white woman, beautiful as a Greek statue, and — like
many an antique statue — headless.

Mutilated or almost unmarred, shriveled in last agony or seeming only
to have dropped into a peaceful sleep, lay the legions of the dead. After
the finding of the dying woman in a cellar, the devastation was searched
in vain for survivors.

Then four days after the catastrophe, two negroes walking through the
wreckage turned gray as they heard faint cries for help issuing from the
depths of the earth.

"Who's that?" they shouted when they could speak. " Where are you?"

Up floated the feeble voice: "I'm down here in the dungeon of the jail.
Help! Save me! Get me out!"

They dug down through the debris, broke open the dungeon door,
and released Auguste Ciparis, the negro criminal.

Some days later, George Kennan and August F. Jaccaci, American
journalists arriving to cover the disaster, located Ciparis in a village in the
country. They secured medical attention for his severe burns, poorly
cared for as yet, and obtained and authenticated his story. When the
scorching air penetrated his cell that day, he smelled his own body burn-
ing but breathed as little as possible during the moment the intense heat
lasted. Ignorant of what had occurred, not realizing that he was buried
alive, he slowly starved for four days in his tomb of a cell. His scant
supply of water was soon gone. Only echoes answered his shouts for

126 THE EARTH

help. When at last he was heard and freed, Ciparis, given a drink of water,
managed with some assistance to walk six kilometers to Morne Rouge.

One who lived where 40,000 died! History records no escape more
marvelous.

1938

Man, Maker of Wilderness

PAUL B. SEARS

From Deserts on the March

HPHE FACE OF EARTH IS A GRAVEYARD, AND SO IT HAS

-*L always been. To earth each living thing restores when it dies that
which has been borrowed to give form and substance to its brief day in
the sun. From earth, in due course, each new living being receives back
again a loan of that which sustains life. What is lent by earth has been used
by countless generations of plants and animals now dead and will be
required by countless others in the future. In the case of an element such
as phosphorus, so limited is the supply that if it were not constantly being
returned to the soil, a single century would be sufficient to produce a
disastrous reduction in the amount of life. No plant or animal, nor any
sort of either, can establish permanent right of possession to the materials
which compose its physical body.

Left to herself, nature manages these loans and redemptions in not
unkindly fashion. She maintains a balance which will permit the briefest
time to elapse between burial and renewal. The turnover of material for
new generations to use is steady and regular. Wind and water, those twin
sextons, do their work as gently as may be. Each type of plant and animal,
so far as it is fit, has its segment of activity and can bring forth its own kind
to the limits of subsistence. The red rule of tooth and claw is less harsh
in fact than in seeming. There is a balance in undisturbed nature between

MAN, MAKER OF WILDERNESS 127

food and feeder, hunter and prey, so that the resources of the earth are
never idle. Some plants or animals may seem to dominate the rest, but
they do so only so long as the general balance is maintained. The whole
world of living things exists as a series of communities whose order and
permanence put to shame all but the most successful of human enterprises.

It is into such an ordered world of nature that primitive man fits as a
part. A family of savage man, living by the chase and gathering wild
plants, requires a space of ten to fifty square miles for subsistence. If
neighbors press too closely, the tomahawk of tribal warfare offers a rude
but perhaps merciful substitute for starvation. Man in such a stage takes
what he can get on fairly even terms with the rest of nature. Wind and
water may strike fear to his heart and even wreak disaster upon him, but
on the whole their violence is tempered. The forces of nature expend
themselves beneficently upon the highly developed and well balanced
forests, grasslands, even desert. To the greatest possible extent the surface
consists of mellow, absorbent soil, anchored and protected by living plants
— a system buffered against the caprice of the elements, although of course
subject to slow and orderly change. Bare ground left by the plow will
have as much soil washed off in ten years as the unbroken prairie will lose
in four thousand. Even so, soil in the prairie will be forming as fast as,
or faster than it is lost.

Living in such a setting, man knows little or nothing of nature's laws,
yet conforms to them with the perfection over which he has no more choice
than the oaks and palms, the cats and reptiles around him. Gradually,
however, and with many halting steps, man has learned enough
about the immutable laws of cause and effect so that with tools,
domestic animals, and crops he can speed up the processes of nature
tremendously along certain lines. The rich Nile Valley can be made to sup-
port, not one, but one thousand people per square mile, as it does today.
Cultures develop, cities and commerce flourish, hunger and fear dwindle
as progress and the conquest of nature expand. Unhappily, nature is not
so easily thwarted. The old problems of population pressure and tribal
warfare appear in newer and more horrible guise, with whole nations
trained for slaughter. And back of it all lies the fact that man has upset
the balance under which wind and water were beneficial agents of con-
struction, to release them as twin demons which carve the soil from
beneath his feet, to hasten the decay and burial of his handiwork.

Nature is not to be conquered save on her own terms. She is not con-
ciliated by cleverness or industry in devising means to defeat the operation
of one of her laws through the workings of another. She is a very busi-
ness-like old lady, who plays no favorites. Man is welcome to outnumber

128 THE EARTH

and dominate the other forms of life, provided he can maintain order
among the relentless forces whose balanced operation he has disturbed.
But this hard condition is one which, to date, he has scarcely met. His own
past is full of clear and somber warnings — vanished civilizations like dead
flies in lacquer, buried beneath their own dust and mud.

For man, who fancies himself the conqueror of it, is at once the maker
and the victim of the wilderness. Even the dense and hostile jungles
of the tropics are often the work of his hands. The virgin forest of the
tropics, as of other climes, is no thicket of scrub and thorn, but a cathe-
dral of massive, well-spaced giant trees under whose dense canopy the
alien and tangled rabble of the jungle does not thrive. Order and per-
manence are here — these giants bring forth young after their own kind,
but only so fast as death and decay break the solid ranks of the elders.
Let man clear these virgin forests, even convert them into fields, he can
scarcely keep them. Nature claims them again, and her advance guards
are the scrambled barriers through which man must chop his way.

In the early centuries of the present era, while the Roman Empire was
cracking to pieces, the Mayas built great cities in Central America. Their
huge pyramids, massive masonry, and elaborate carving are proof of capac-
ity and leisure. They also indicate that the people who built them prob-
ably felt a sense of security, permanence, and accomplishment as solid as
our own. To them the end of their world was no doubt unthinkable save
as a device of priestly dialectic, or an exercise of the romantic imagination.
Food there was in abundance, furnished by the maize, cacao, beans,
and a host of other plants of which southern Mexico is the first home.
Fields were easily cleared by girdling trees with sharp stone hatchets. You
can write your name on plate glass with their little jadeite chisels. The
dead trees were then, as they are today in Yucatan, destroyed by fire,
and crops were planted in their ashes.

Yet by the sixth century all of this was abandoned and the Second
Empire established northward in Yucatan, to last with varying fortunes
until the Spanish conquest. Pyramids and stonework became the play-
ground of the jungle, so hidden and bound beneath its knotted mesh
that painful labor has been required to reveal what is below. Farther
north in Yucatan, in humble villages, are the modern people, unable to
read the hieroglyphs of their ancestors, and treasuring only fragments of
the ancient lore which have survived by word of mouth. There persists
among these people, for example, a considerable body of knowledge con-
cerning medicinal plants, their properties and mode of use. But the power
and glory of the cities is gone. In their place are only ruins and wilderness.

MAN, MAKER OF WILDERNESS 129

Their world, once so certain, stable, dependable, and definite, is gone.
And why?

Here of course, is a first-rate mystery for modern skill and knowledge
to unravel. The people were not exterminated, nor their cities taken over
by an enemy. Plagues may cause temporary migrations, but not the perma-
nent abandonment of established and prosperous centers. The present
population to the north has its share of debilitating infections, but its
ancestors were not too weak or wasted to establish the Second Empire
after they left the First. Did the climate in the abandoned cities become so
much more humid that the invasion of dense tropical vegetation could not
be arrested, while fungous pests, insects, and diseases took increasing toll ?
This is hard to prove. Were the inhabitants starved out because they had
no steel tools or draft animals to break the heavy sod which formed over
their resting fields? Many experts think so.

Certainly the soil of the wet tropics is very different from the deep rich
black soil of the prairies. Just as soaking removes salt from a dried
mackerel, so the nourishing minerals are quickly removed from these soils
by the abundant water. In the steaming hot climate the plant and animal
materials which fall upon the ground are quickly rotted, sending gases
into the air and losing much of what is left, in the pounding, soaking wash
of the heavy tropical rains. Such organic material as may be present is
well incinerated when the forest covering is killed and burned, as it was
by the ancient Mayas, and still is by their descendants. Such a clearing will
yield a heavy crop for a few seasons, by virtue of the fertilizer in the ashes
and what little is left in the soil. Presently the yield must decline to the
point where cultivation is no longer possible. A fresh clearing is made
and the old one abandoned. Step by step the cultivation proceeds farther
from the place of beginning. Whether the idle fields, forming an ever
widening border about the great cities, came to be hidden beneath an
armor of impenetrable turf or completely ruined by sheet erosion and
puddling, is immaterial. The restoration of fertility by idleness has proved
a failure even in temperate climates. It is not a matter of one, or even
several, human generations, but a process of centuries. The cities of the
Mayas were doomed by the very system that gave them birth. Man's con-
quest of nature was an illusion, however brilliant. Like China before the
Manchu invaders, or Russia in the face of Napoleon, the jungle seemed to
yield and recede before the Mayas, only to turn with deadly, relentless
deliberation and strangle them.

So much for a striking case of failure in the New World. How about
the Old— the cradle of humanity? Here there are striking cases of apparent
success, long continued, such as eastern China and the Nile Valley. On

130 THE EARTH

the other hand are many instances of self-destruction as dramatic as that
of the Mayas — for example the buried cities of the Sumerian desert. Let
us examine both failure and seeming success; after we have done so, we
shall realize how closely they are interwoven.

The invention of flocks and herds of domestic animals enable man to
increase and prevail throughout the great grassy and even the desert
interior of the Old World. Food and wealth could be moved on the hoof.
A rough and ready "cowpuncher" psychology was developed as a matter
of course, combining a certain ruthless capacity for quick action along with
an aversion to sustained and methodical labor, except for women. Living
as these people did, in a region where water was none too abundant and
pasture not always uniform, movement was necessary. Normally this was
a seasonal migration — a round trip like that of the buffalo and other wild
grazing animals. But from time to time the combination of events brought
about complete and extensive shifts.

Where moisture was more abundant, either directly from rain, or
indirectly through huge rivers, another invention took place. This second
invention was the cultivation of certain nutritious grasses with unusually
large fruits — the cereals. Probably not far from the mouth of the Yangtze
River in southeastern China rice was domesticated, while at the eastern
end of the Mediterranean wheat and barley were put to similar use, both
in Irak (Mesopotamia) and Egypt. Along with these cereals many other
plants, such as beans, clover, alfalfa, onions, and the like were grown.
This invention provided food cheaply and on a hitherto unprecedented
scale. Domestic animals could now be penned, using their energy to make
flesh and milk instead of running it off in the continued movements for
grass and water. Other animals like the cat and dog relieved man of the
necessity of guarding his stored wealth against the raids of rats and
robbers. Large animals like the ox and ass saved him the labor of carriage
and helped in threshing and tillage. The people themselves became
accustomed to methodical and prolonged labor. They devised means of
storage and transport and developed commerce. Mechanical contrivances
proved useful and were encouraged. On the other hand such folk were not
celebrated for their aggressiveness nor for an itching foot. As they became
organized and accumulated a surplus of skill and energy they developed
great cities and other public works, with all adornments.

The history of early civilization can be written largely in terms of
these two great inventions in living — the pastoral life of the dry interior
and the settled agriculture of the well-watered regions. Their commerce,
warfare, and eventual, if imperfect, combination make the Western
Europe of today. What of their effects upon the land?

MAN, MAKER OF WILDERNESS 131

Wherever we turn, to Asia, Europe, or Africa, we shall find the same
story repeated with an almost mechanical regularity. The net productive-
ness of the land has been decreased. Fertility has been consumed and soil
destroyed at a rate far in excess of the capacity of either man or nature to
replace. The glorious achievements of civilization have been builded on
borrowed capital to a scale undreamed by the most extravagant of mon-
archs. And unlike the bonds which statesmen so blithely issue to — and
against — their own people, an obligation has piled up which cannot be
repudiated by the stroke of any man's pen.

Uniformly the nomads of the interior have crowded their great ranges
to the limit. The fields may look as green as ever, until the inevitable drier
years come along. The soil becomes exposed, to be blown away by wind,
or washed into great flooded rivers during the infrequent, usually tor-
rential rains. The cycle of erosion gains momentum, at times conveying
wealth to the farmer downstream in the form of rich black soil, but quite
as often destroying and burying his means of livelihood beneath a coat
of sterile mud.

The reduction of pasture, even with the return of better years, dislocates
the scheme of things for the owners of flocks and herds. Raids, mass migra-
tions, discouraged and feeble attempts at agriculture, or, rarely, the
development of irrigation and dry farming result — and history is made.

Meanwhile, in the more densely settled regions of cereal farming, popu-
lation pressure demands every resource to maintain yield. So long as rich
mud is brought downstream in thin layers at regular intervals, the
valleys yield good returns at the expense of the continental interior. But
such imperial gifts are hard to control, increasingly so as occupation and
overgrazing upstream develop. In the course of events farming spreads
from the valley to the upland. The forests of the upland are stripped,
both for their own product and for the sake of the ground which they
occupy. Growing cities need lumber, as well as food. For a time these
upland forest soils of the moister regions yield good crops, but gradually
they too are exhausted. Imperceptibly sheet erosion moves them into the
valleys, with only temporary value to the latter. Soon the rich black valley
soil is overlain by pale and unproductive material from the uplands. The
latter may become an abandoned range of gullies, or in rarer cases human
resourcefulness may come to the fore, and by costly engineering works
combined with agronomic skill, defer the final tragedy of abandonment.

Thus have we sketched, in broad strokes to be sure, the story of man's
destruction upon the face of his own Mother Earth. The story on the older
continents has been a matter of millennia. In North America it has been
a matter of not more than three centuries at most — generally a matter

132 THE EARTH

of decades. Mechanical invention plus exuberant vitality have accomplished
the conquest of a continent with unparalleled speed, but in doing so have
broken the gentle grip wherein nature holds and controls the forces
which serve when restrained, destroy when unleashed.

*935

What Makes the Weather

THE SEVEN AMERICAN AIRS
WOLFGANG LANGEWIESCHE

WAKE UP ONE MORNING AND YOU ARE SURPRISED:
-"- the weather, which had been gray and dreary for days and seemed
as if it were going to stay that way forever, with no breaks in the clouds
and no indication of a gradual clearing, is now all of a sudden clear and
sunny and crisp, with a strong northwest wind blowing, and the whole
world looks newly washed and newly painted.

"It" has become "fine." Why? How?

"Something" has cleared the air, you might say. But what? You might
study out the weather news in the back of your newspaper, and you would
get it explained to you in terms of barometric highs and lows; but just
why a rise of barometric pressure should clear the air would still leave you
puzzled. The honest truth is that the weather has never been explained.
In school they told you about steam engines or electricity or even about
really mysterious things, such as gravitation, and they could do it so
that it made sense to a boy. They told you also about the weather, but
their explanations failed to explain, and you knew it even then. The lows
and highs, cyclones and anti-cyclones, the winds that blew around in circles
— all these things were much more puzzling than the weather itself. That
is why weather has always made only the dullest conversation: there
simply was no rhyme nor reason to it.

But now there is. A revolutionary fresh view has uncovered the rhyme

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 133

and reason in the weather. Applied to your particular surprise of that
morning, it has this to say:

Thejiir^vhkh^^ is .still warm^ moist,

and gray this morning ;, but it Jias been pushed fifty or one hundred
to the south and east of where_^pujiyea _and has been replaced by aj
of "cold, clear, dry air coming from the north or west. It is as simple as that;
there is no mysterious "It" in it; just plain physical sense. It is called Air
Mass Analysis.

It is based upon the researches and experiments of a. physicist named
YilhdlII_Bigrkncs, of_Nprway, and though in this particular case it
seems almostT childishly simple, it is Norway's greatest contribution to
world culture since Ibsen. Or perhaps because it is simple — the rare
example of a science which in becoming more sophisticated also becomes
more common sense and easier to understand. It is so new that it hasn't
yet reached the newspapers, nor the high school curricula, much less the
common knowledge of the public in general. But the weather bureaus
of the airlines have worked by it for years, and pilots have to learn it.
It is indispensable both in commercial flying and in air war; we could fly
without gasoline, without aluminum, perhaps without radio, but we could
never do without Bjerknes's Air Mass Analysis.

You might inquire next whereThat morning's new air came from, and
just how it got to be cold, dry, and clear. And there you get close to the
heart of the new weather science, where meteorology turns into honest,
common-sense geography.

That air has come from Canada, where it has been quite literally air-
conditioned. Not all parts ~bf the world have the power to condition air,
but Canada has. Especially in the fall and winter and early spring, the
northern part of this continent becomes^ an almost perfectly designed
mechanical refrigeratoiTTrie "Rocky Mountains in the west keep currents
of new air from flowing intolBe" regBru And for weeks the air lies still.
The cool ground, much of it snow-covered; the ice of the frozen lakes;
plus the perennial stored-up coldness of Hudson's Bay — all cool the layer
of air immediately above them. This means a stabilizing and calming of
the whole atmosphere all the way up; for cool air is heavy^ and with a
heavy layer bottommost, there is none_of that upflowing of air, that up-
welling of moisture-laden heat into the cooler,Tiigh altitude which is the
mechanism that makes cloud siTHus there may be some low ground fogs
there, but above them the long nights of those northern latitudes are clear
and starry, wide open toward the black infinite spaces of the universe;
and into that black infinity the air gradually radiates whatever warmth it
may contain from its previous sojourns over other parts of the world*

134 THE EARTH

The result, after weeks of stagnation, is a huge mass of air that is uni-
formly ice-cold, dry, and clear. It stretches from the Rocky Mountains
in the west to Labrador in the east, from the ice wastes of the Arctic to the
prairies of Minnesota and North Dakota; and — the third dimension is the
most important — it is ice-cold from the ground all the way up to the
stratosphere. It is, in short, a veritable glacier of air.

That is an air mass. In the jargon of air-faring men, a mass of JPolar
Canadian' ain"

When a wave of good, fresh Polar Canadian air sweeps southward into
the United States — it happens almost rhythmically every few days — you
don't need a barometer to tell you so. There is nothing subtle, theoretical,
or scientific about it. You can see and feel the air itself and even hear it. It
comes surging out of a blue-green sky across the Dakptas, shaking the
hangar doors, whistling in the grassTputting those red-checkered thick
woolen jackets on the men, and lighting the stoves in the houses. It flows
southward down the Mississippi Valley as a cold wave in winter, or as
relief from a heat wave in summer, blowing as a northwest wind with
small white hurrying clouds in it. In winter it may sweep southward as
far as Tennessee and the Carolinas, bringing frosts with brilliantly^clear
skies, making the darkies shiver in their drafty cabins, and producing a
wave of deaths by pneumonia. Sometimes it even reaches the Texas Gulf
Coast; then it is locally called a norther, and the cows at night crowd for
warmth around the gas flares in the oil fields. A duck hunter dies of
exposure in the coastal swamps. A lively outbreak of Polar Canadian air
may reach down into Florida, damage the orange crops, and embarrass
local Chambers of Commerce. And deep outbreaks have been observed to
drive all the way down to Central America, where they are feared as a
fierce wind called the Tehuantepecer.

Polar Canadian is only one of many sorts of air. To put it in the
unprecise language of the layman, the great Norwegian discovery is that
air must always be of some distinct type: that it is never simply air but
always conditioned and flavored. What we call weather is caused by
gigantic waves in the air ocean which flood whole countries and conti-
nents for days at a stretch with one sort of air or another. And there is
nothing theoretical about any of these various sorts of air.

Each kind is easily seen and felt and sniffed, and is, in fact, fairly
familiar even to the city dweller, although he may not realize it. Each has
its own peculiar characteristics, its own warmth or coolness, dampness or
dryness, milkiness or clearness. Each has its own quality of light. In each,
smoke behaves differently as it pours from the chimneys: in some kinds
of air it creeps lazily, in some it bubbles away, in some it floats in layers-

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 135

That is largely why the connoisseur can distinguish different types of air
by smell.

Each type of air combines those qualities into an "atmosphere" of its
own. Each makes an entirely different sort of day. In fact, what sort of day
it is — raw, oppressive, balmy, dull, a "spring" day — depends almost entirely
upon the sort of air that lies over your particular section of the country at
that particular time.

And if you tried to describe the day in the old-fashioned terms — wind
direction and velocity, humidity, state of the sky — you could never quite
express its particular weather; but you can by naming the sort of air. An
airplane pilot, once he is trained in the new weather thinking, can get
quite impatient with the attempts of novelists, for instance, to describe
weather. "Why don't you say it was Polar Canadian air and get on with
your story?"

And if you are a connoisseur of airs just about the first thing you will
note every morning is something like, "Ah, Caribbean air to-day"; or if
you are really a judge you can make statements as detailed as, "Saskatch-
ewan air, slightly flavored by the Great Lakes."

For just as wines do, the airs take their names and their flavors from
the regions where they have matured. Of the seven airs that make up the
American weather, one is quite rare and somewhat mysterious. It is
known by the peculiarly wine-like name of Sec Superieur. It is believed
to be of tropical origin, but it comes to this continent after spending weeks
in the stratosphere somewhere above the Galapagos Islands. It is usually
found only high aloft, and interests pilots more than farmers. But once
in a while a tongue of it reaches the ground as hot, extremely dry, very
clear weather; and wherever it licks there is a drought.

The other six airs all come from perfectly earthly places, though far-
away ones. The easiest to recognize, the liveliest, is Polar Canadian. Its
opposite number in the American sky is Trnpicd JGlilf ^r Trnpirrrf
AtlagtJ£.(<Jaiirr-the steamy, warm air of the Eastern and MidvE&§j£rn
summer^ the kind Hiaf "comes alHTsotfftTfl^ starts people to

taflungabout heat and humidity, the kind that is sometimes so steamy that
it leaves you in doubt as to whether the sky means to be blue or overcast.
This air is brewed of hot sun and warm sea water in the Caribbean
region. The mechanism that does the air conditioning in this case is
mostly the daily afternoon thunderstorm which carries moisture and heat
high aloft in it.

Not quite SQ obvious is the origin of the moist, silvery, coolicbaununer^
cool-in-winter air that dominates the wcathciL^-Sga.tdf • It jscallej Polar
PaciBcpand it is a trick product. Its basic characteristics have been

136 THE EARTH

acquired over Siberia and it is cold and dry; but on its way across the
Pacific its lower five to ten thousand feet have been warmed up and
moistened. Sometimes such air comes straight across, reaching land in a
couple of days. Sometimes it hangs over the water for a week, and it
takes a good weatherman to predict just what sort of weather it will
produce.

Its counterpart is a flavor known as Tropical Pacific. That is the air they
sell to tourists in Southern California. It is really just plain South Seas
air, though the story here too is not as clear-cut as it might be.

A clear-cut type is Polar Atlaruic^ir. It sometimes blows down the New
England coast as a nor'easter, cold, rainy, with low clouds. It is simply
a chunk of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland gone traveling, and you
can almost smell the sea.

And one air that every tourist notices in the Southwest is Tropical Con-'
tinental. Its source region is the deserts of Arizona and Mexico. It is dry
and hot and licks up moisture so greedily that it makes water feel on youf
skin as chilly as if it were gasoline. It is not an important one for America,
though its European counterpart, Saharan air, is important for Europe.
Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas are as far as it ever gets; but even so,
a few extra outbreaks of it per year, and we have a dust bowl.

The air mass idea is simple. As great ideas often do, the air mass idea
makes you feel that you have known it right along. And in a vague way,
you have. Take, for example, that half-brag, half-complaint of the Texans
that there is nothing between Texas and the North Pole to keep out those
northers but a barbed wire fence: it contains the kernel of the whole idea —
the invading air mass — but only in a fooling way. Or take the manner in
which the Mediterranean people have always given definite names to cer-
tain winds (boreas, sirocco, mistral) that blow hot or cold, dry or moist,
across their roofs. They are names, however, without the larger view. In
creative literature such things as a cold front passage — the sudden arrival
of a cold air mass — have been described several times quite accurately,
but always as a local spectacle, with the key thought missing.

Actually it took genius to see it. For air is a mercurial fluid, bubbly,
changeable; it is as full of hidden energies as dynamite; it can assume the
most unexpected appearances. There are days, to be sure, when the air
virtually advertises its origin. Offhand, you might say that on perhaps half
the days of the year it does. But there are also days when it$ appearance is
altogether misleading.

Take, for example, the amazing metamorphosis that happens to

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 137

Tropical Gulf air when it flows northward across the United States in
winter. It starts out from among the Islands looking blue and sunny and
like an everlasting summer afternoon. When it arrives over the northern
United States that same air appears as a dark-gray shapeless, drizzling over-
cast, and in the office buildings of New York and Chicago the electric
lights are on throughout what is considered a shivery winter day. It is
still the same air; if we could mix a pink dye into the air, as geographers
sometimes mix dyes into rivers to trace the flow of water, a cloud of pink
air would have traveled from Trinidad to New York. It has hardly
changed at all its actual contents of heat and water; but as far as its
appearance and its feel are concerned — its "weather" value — a few days
of northward traveling have reversed it almost into a photographic nega-
tive of itself.

What happens in this particular case — and it accounts for half our winter
days — is simply that the cool ground of the wintry continent chills this
moist, warm air mass — chills it just a little, not enough to change its
fundamental character, and not all the way up into its upper levels, but in
its bottommost Ir.yer and that only just enough to make it condense out
some of its abundant moisture in the form of visible clouds; it is quite
similar to the effect of a cold window pane on the air of a well-heated,
comfortable room — there is wetness and cooling right at the window, but
the bulk of the room's air is not affected.

Perhaps the oddest example of this is the trick by which Polar Pacific
air, striking the United States at Seattle, cool and moist, arrives in eastern
Montana and the Dakotas as a chinook, a hot, dry, snow-melting wind.

As Polar Pacific air flows up the slopes of the Sierras and the Cascades
it is lifted ten thousand feet into the thinner air of higher altitude. By one
law of physics the lifting should chill the air through release of pressure.
If you have ever bled excess pressure out of your tires you know this cool-
ing by release of pressure — you know how ice-cold the air comes hissing
out. But in this case, by a different law of physics, Polar Pacific reacts by
cooling only moderately; then it starts condensing out its moisture and
thereby protecting its warmth; hence the tremendous snowfalls of the
sierras, the giant redwoods, the streams that irrigate California ranches.

Once across the Cascades and the Sierras, the air flows down the eastern
slopes. In descending it comes under pressure and therefore heats up, just
as air heats up in a tire pump. Warmed, the air increases its capacity to
hold moisture; it becomes relatively drier — thus this air sucks back its
own clouds into invisible form. When it arrives over the Columbia Basin,
or the country round Reno, or Owens Valley, it is regular desert air —
warm, very clear, and very dry. That is why the western deserts are

138 THE EARTH

where they are. Flowing on eastward, it comes against another hump,
the Continental Divide and the Rockies. Here the whole process repeats
itself. Again the air is lifted and should become ice-cold; again it merely
cools moderately, clouds up, and drops its remaining moisture to protect
its warmth; hence the lush greenery of Coeur d'Alene, the pine forests
of New Mexico. Finally, as the air flows down the eastern slope of the
Rockies, compression heats it once more, as in the bicycle pump. Twice
on the way up it has dropped moisture and thus failed to cool; twice
on the way down it has been heated : it is now extremely dry, and twenty
degrees warmer than it was at Seattle. That is the chinook, a wind
manufactured of exactly the sort of principles that work in air-condition-
ing machinery, and a good example of the trickery of air masses. But it
is still a simple thing; it is still one actual physically identical mass of air
that you are following. It you had put pink smoke into it at Seattle, pink
smoke would have arrived in South Dakota.

That is how the air mass concept explains all sorts of weather detail:
the various kinds of rain — showery or steady; the many types of cloud —
low or high, solid or broken, layered or towering; thunderstorms; fog.
An air mass, thus-and-thus conditioned, will react differently as it flows
over the dry plains, the freshly plowed cotton fields, the cool lakes, the
hot pavements, the Rocky Mountains of the United States.

An airplane pilot's weather sense consists largely of guessing the exact
manner in which a given sort of air will behave along his route. Tropical
Gulf in summer over Alabama? Better not get caught in the middle after-
noon with a low fuel reserve. We shall have to detour around many
thunderstorms. The details are as multifarious as geography itself, but
much of it has by now been put into the manuals, and the pilot memorizes
such items as these:

Canadian air that passes over the Great Lakes in winter is moistened
and warmed in its lower layers and becomes highly unstable. When such
air hits the rolling country of western Pennsylvania and New York and
the ridges of the Appalachians the hills have a sort of "trigger action"
and cause snow flurries or rain squalls with very low ceilings and visibility.

In summer, Canadian air that flows into New England, dried, without
passing over the Great Lakes, will be extremely clear and extremely
bumpy.

Tropical Gulf over the South forms patchy ground fog just before
sunrise that will persist for two or three hours.

As Polar Pacific air moves southward along the Pacific Coast it forms
a layer of "high fog."

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 139

In Colorado and Nebraska fresh arriving Canadian air frequently shows
as a dust storm.

Given two types of country underneath, one kind of air can produce
two sorts oi weather only a few miles apart. Tropical Atlantic air, for
instance, appears over the hills of New England as hot and summery
weather, slightly hazy, inclined toward afternoon thunderstorms. A few
miles of? the coast the same air appears as low banks of fog. That is
because the granite and the woods are warmed all through, and actually
a little warmer than Tropical Gulf air itself, at least during the day;
while the ocean is much colder than the air, and cools it.

Again, one kind of country can have opposite effects on two different
types of air. For example, the farms of the Middle West in the spring
when the frost is just out of the ground: that sort of country feels cool
to Tropical Gulf air that has flowed up the Mississippi Valley. The bottom
layers of that warm moist air are chilled and thus the whole air mass is
stabilized. It will stay nicely in layers; the clouds will form a flat, level
overcast; smoke will spread and hover as a pall. But to a mass of freshly
broken-out Canadian air that sort of country feels warm. The air in
immediate contact with the ground is warmed, and the whole mass
becomes bottom-light and unstable.

And that means action: a commotion much like the boiling of water
on a huge scale and in slow motion. The warmed air floats away upward
to the colder air aloft, forming bubbles of rising air, hundreds of feet
in diameter, that are really hot-air balloons without a skin.

Those rising chunks of air are felt by fliers as bumps. When the ship
flies into one it gets an upward jolt; when it flies out again it gets a down-
ward jolt. They are what makes it possible to fly a glider, even over flat
country; all you have to do is to find one of those bubbles, stay in it by
circling in a tight turn, and let it carry you aloft.

The clear air, the tremendous visibility of such a day is itself the result
of instability: the rising bubbles carry away the dust, the haze, the indus-
trial smoke. The air is always roughest on one of those crisp, clear, newly
washed days. If the rising air gets high enough it makes cumulus clouds,
those characteristic, towering, puffy good-weather clouds. That sort of
cloud is nothing but a puff of upward wind become visible. The rise
has cooled the air and made its water vapor visible. Soaring pilots seek
to get underneath a cumulus cloud — there is sure to be a lively upflow
there. Sometimes, in really unstable air, the rising of the air reaches
hurricane velocities. We call that a thunderstorm, but the lightning and
thunder are only by-products of the thing. The thing itself is simply a
vicious, explosive upsurging of air: the wind in thunderstorms blows

140 THE EARTH

sixty to one hundred miles per hour — straight up! The most daring of
soaring pilots have flown into thunderstorms and have been sucked up
almost to the stratosphere.

The weatherman, unlike the pilot, need not guess. He has got a slide
rule; he has got the laws of gases, Charles's Law, Boyle's Law, Buys
Ballot's Law at his fingertips. He has studied thermodynamics, and he
has got a new device that is the biggest thing in weather science since
Torricelli invented the barometer — the radio sonde with which he can
take soundings of the upper air, find out just how moisture and tempera-
ture conditions are aloft, just how stable or unstable the air will be, at
what level the clouds will form, and of what type they will be.

Radio sondes go up in the dead of night from a dozen airports all over
the continent. The radio sonde looks like a box of candy, being a small
carton wrapped in tinfoil; but it is actually a radio transmitter coupled
to a thermometer and a moisture-meter. It is hung on a small parachute
which is hitched to a balloon. It takes perhaps an hour for the balloon
to reach the stratosphere, and all the time it signals its own readings in
a strange, quacky voice, half Donald Duck, half voice from the beyond.
Then it stops. You know that the balloon has burst, the parachute is
letting the instrument down gently.

The next morning some farm boy finds the shiny thing in a field, with
a notice attached offering a reward for mailing it back to the weather
bureau.

Also the next morning a man in Los Angeles paces up and down his
office, scanning the wall where last night's upper-air soundings are tacked
up. Emitting heavy cigar smoke and not even looking out of the window,
he dictates a weather forecast for the transcontinental airway as far east
as Salt Lake City, a forecast that goes into such detail that you sometimes
think he is trying to show off.

With the air mass idea as a key, you can make more sense out of the
weather than the professional weatherman could before Bjerknes; and
even if you don't understand Boyle's Law and all the intricate physics
of the atmosphere, you can do a quite respectable job of forecasting.

It goes like this : suppose you are deep in Caribbean air. You will have
"air mass weather": a whole series of days of the typical sort that goes
with that particular type of air when it overlies your particular section of
the country in that particular season. There will be all sorts of minor
changes; there will be a daily cycle of weather, clouds, perhaps thunder-
storms, or showers; but essentially the weather will be the same day aftet

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 141

day. Any real change in weather can come only as an incursion of a new
air mass — probably Polar Canadian.

And when that air mass comes you will know it. New air rarely comes
gently, gradually, by imperceptible degrees; almost always the new air
mass advances into the old one with a clear-cut, sharply defined forward
front. Where two air masses adjoin each other you may in half an hour's
driving — in five minutes' flying — change your entire weather, travel
from moist, muggy, cloudy weather into clear, cool, sunny weather.
That clear-cut boundary is exactly what makes an air mass a distinct
entity which you can plot on a map and say, "Here it begins; here it
ends"; these sharp boundaries of the air masses are called "fronts" and
are a discovery as important as the air mass itself.

You are watching, then, for a "cold front," the forward edge of an
advancing mass of cold air. You will get almost no advance warning.
You will see the cold air mass only when it is practically upon you. But
you know that sooner or later it must come, and that it will come from
the northwest. Thus, an occasional long-distance call will be enough-
Suppose you are in Pittsburgh, with a moist, warm southwest wind: the
bare news that Chicago has a northerly wind might be enough of a clue..
If you knew also that Chicago was twenty degrees cooler you would be
certain that a cold air mass had swamped Chicago and was now presum-
ably on its way to Pittsburgh, traveling presumably at something like
30 m.p.h. You could guess the time of arrival of its forward front within
a few hours. That is why the most innocent weather reports are now
so secret; why the British censor suppresses snow flurries in Scotland;,
why a submarine in the Atlantic would love to know merely the wind
direction and temperature at, say, Columbus, Ohio; why the Gestapo*
had that weather station in Greenland.

Knowing that a cold front is coming, you know what kind of weather
to expect; though some cold fronts are extremely fierce, and others quite
gentle (noticeable only if you watch for them), the type is always the
same. It is all in the book — Bjerknes described it and even drew pictures
of it. It was the advance of such a cold front which occurred while you
slept that night before you awoke to find the world fresh and newly
painted.

Cold air is heavy; as polar air plows into a region occupied by tropical
air it underruns; it gets underneath the warm air and lifts it up even
as it pushes it back. A cold front acts physically like a cowcatcher.

Seen from the ground, the sequence of events is this: an hour or two-
before the cold front arrives the clouds in the sky become confused,,
somewhat like a herd of cattle that smells the coyotes; but you observe-

142 THE EARTH

that by intuition rather than by measurable signs. Apart from that, there
are no advance signs. The wind will be southerly to the last, and the air
warm and moist.

Big cumulus clouds build up all around, some of them with dark
bases, showers, and in summer thunder and lightning — that is the warm
moist air going aloft. A dark bank of solid cloud appears in the north-
west, and though the wind is still southerly, this bank keeps building up
and coming nearer: it is the actual forward edge of the advancing cold
air. When it arrives there is a cloudburst. Then the cold air comes sweep-
ing in from the northwest with vicious gusts. This is the squall that cap-
sizes sailboats and uproots trees, flattens forests and unroofs houses.

The whole commotion probably is over in half an hour. The wind eases
up, though it is still cool and northwesterly, the rain ceases, the clouds
break and new sky shows: the front has passed, the cold air mass has
arrived.

The weatherman can calculate these things too. He has watched and
sounded out each of the two air masses for days or even weeks, ever
since it moved into his ken somewhere on the outskirts of the American
world. Thus an airline weatherman may look at a temperature-moisture
graph and say, "This is dynamite. This air will be stable enough as long
as it isn't disturbed. But wait till some cold air gets underneath this and
starts lifting it. This stuff is going to go crazy."

In making your own guess you would take the same chance that the
weatherman takes every morning — that you might be right and yet get
an error chalked up against you. Suppose the Chicago weatherman,
seeing a cold front approach, forecasts thunderstorms. One thunderstorm
passes north of the city, disturbing the 30,000 inhabitants of Waukegan.
Another big one passes south of Chicago, across farms just south of Ham-
mond, Ind., affecting another 30,000 people. None happens to hit Chicago
itself, with its 3 million people. On a per capita basis, the weatherman was
98 per cent wrong! Actually he was right.

Now you are in the cold air mass, and you can reasonably expect "air
mass weather" for a while rather than "frontal" weather; />., a whole
series of whatever sort of day goes with Canadian air in your particular
section of the country at that particular season.

Any real change in the weather nous can again come only with an
incursion of a new and different air mass— and now that will probably
mean tropical maritime air of the Gulf kind. To forecast that invasion
is no trick at all: you can see the forward front of the warm air mass
in the sky several days before it sweeps in on the ground. Warm air is
light. As Caribbean air advances into a region occupied by Canadian air

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 143

it produces a pattern that is the exact opposite of the cold front. The
warm front overhangs forward, overruns the cold air; the warm air mass
may appear high above Boston when at ground level it is just invading
Richmond, Va.

Again the sequence of events is predictable — Bjerknes drew the picture.
It is the approaching warm front that makes for "bad" weather, for rain
of the steady, rather than the showery kind, for low ceilings.

Consider a warm front on the morning when its foot is near Rich-
mond and its top over Boston. Boston that morning sees streaks of cirrus
in its sky — "mares' tails," the white, feathery, diaphanous cloud arranged
in filaments and bands, that is so unsubstantial that the sun shines clear
through it and you are hardly conscious of it as a cloud — and actually it
doesn't consist of water droplets, as do most clouds, but of ice crystals.
New Haven the same morning has the same kind of cloud, but slightly
thicker, more nearly as a solid, milky layer. New York that same morning
sees the warm air as a gray solid overcast at 8,000 feet. Philadelphia has
the same sort of cloud at 5,000, with steady rain. Washington has 1,500
feet, rain. Quantico and Richmond report fog, and all airplanes are
grounded. Raleigh, N.C., has clearing weather, the wind has shifted that
morning to the southwest, and it is getting hot and humid there. Raleigh
would be definitely behind the front, well in the warm air mass itself.

By nightfall Boston has the weather that was New Haven's in the
morning. The moon, seen through a milky sheet of cirrus clouds, has a
halo: "There is going to be rain." New Haven that night has New York's
weather of that morning; New York has Philadelphia's; and so on down
the line — the whole front has advanced one hundred miles. In fore-
casting the weather for Boston it is safe to guess that Boston will get in
succession New Haven weather, New York weather, Philadelphia,
Washington, Richmond weather — and finally Raleigh weather — in a
sequence that should take two or three days: steady lowering clouds,
rainy periods, some fog — followed finally by a wind shift to the southwest,
and rapid breaking of clouds, and much warmer, very humid weather.

And then the cycle begins all over. You are then deep in Caribbean
air again. You will have Caribbean air mass weather, and your weather eye
had better be cocked northwest to watch for the first signs of polar air.

There is a rhythm, then, in the weather, or at least a sort of rhyme,
a repetitive sequence. All those folk rules that attribute weather changes
to the phases of the moon, or to some other simple periodicity ("If the
weather is O.K. on Friday, it is sure to rain over the week-end") are

144 THE EARTH

not so far from the mark after all. The rhythm does not work in terms
of rain or shine; but it does work in terms of air masses; and thus,
indirectly and loosely, through the tricky physics of the air, it governs
also the actual weather.

What makes the air masses move, and what makes them move
rhythmically — that is the crowning one of the great Norwegian discov-
eries. Some of it had long been known. It was understood that the motive
power is the sun. By heating the tropics and leaving the polar region
cold, it sets up a worldwide circulation of air, poleward at high altitude,
equatorward at lower levels. It was understood that this simple circulation
is complicated by many other factors such as the monsoon effect: conti-
nents heat up in summer and draw air in from over the ocean, in winter
they cool and air flows out over the ocean; there was the baffling Coriolis
Force that makes all moving things (on the Northern Hemisphere)
curve to the right. In everyday life we don't notice it, but some geogra-
phers hold that it affects the flow of rivers, and artillerymen make allow-
ance for it: a long-range gun is always aimed at a spot hundreds of yards
to the left of the target. The monsoons and the Coriolis Force between
them break up the simple pole-to-equator-to-pole flow of the air into a
worldwide complicated system of interlocking "wheels" — huge eddies
that show variously as tradewinds, calm belts, prevailing westerlies.
Charts have been drawn of the air ocean's currents showing how air is
piled up over some parts of the world, rushed away from others.

But it remained for the Norwegians to discover the polar front —
perhaps the last-discovered geographical thing on this earth. Bjerknes
himself first saw it — that the worldwide air circulation keeps piling up
new masses of polar air in the north and pressing them southward; it
keeps piling up new masses of tropical air in the south, pressing them
northward; and thus forever keeps forcing tropical and polar air masses
against each other along a front; that the demarcation line between
tropical air masses, pressing northward, and polar air masses, pressing
southward, runs clear around the world: through North America and
across the Atlantic, through Europe and across Siberia, through Japan
and across the Pacific. The polar front is clear-cut in some places, tends
to wash out in others; but it always reestablishes itself.

In summer, the polar front runs across North America north of the
Great Lakes; in winter, it takes up a position across the United States.
Wherever it is, it keeps advancing southward, retreating northward,
much like a battlefront. And all the cold fronts and warm fronts are
but sections of this greater front.

The rhythmical flowing of the air masses, the Norwegians discovered,

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER 145

is simply this wave action along the polar front. Like all the rest of the
modern weather concepts, this one becomes common sense, almost self-
evident — the moment you realize that air is stuff, a real fluid that has
density and weight. Except that it occurs on a scale of unhuman mag-
nitude, wave action along the polar front is almost exactly the same thing
as waves on a lake.

In a lake, a dense, heavy fluid — the water — lies underneath a thin, light
fluid — the air — and the result is that rhythmical welling up and down
of the lake-surface that we call waves. Along the polar front, a dense,
heavy fluid, the polar air, lies to the north of a thin, lighter fluid, the
tropical air; the result is a rhythmical welling southward and northward
of the two kinds of air. When a water wave rolls across a lake its first
manifestation is a downward bulging of the water, then an upward
surging. When a wave occurs in the polar front it appears first as a
northward surging of warm air, and that means all the phenomena of a
warm front. Then, in the rhythmical backswing, comes the southward
surging of cold air, and that means all the phenomena of a cold front.

These waves are bigger than the imagination can easily encompass.
They measure 500 to 1,000 miles from crest to crest. When tropical air
surges northward it will wash to the edge of the Arctic; when Polar air
surges southward it reaches down into the tropics. Such a wave will
travel along the polar front all the way from somewhere out in the
Pacific, across the United States and out to the Atlantic; that is the
meteorological action which underlies the recent novel Storm by George
Stewart: the progress of a wave along the polar front.

So similar are these air waves to the air-water waves of a lake that there
are even whitecaps and breakers. What we call a whitecap or a breaker
is a whirling together of air and water into a white foam. In the great
waves along the polar front the same toppling-over can occur: warm and
cold air sometimes wheel around each other, underrun and overrun each
other, in a complicated, spiral pattern.

And that is where the old papery weather science of the schoolbooks
merges with the realistic observations of the Norwegians. You remember
about those Lows that were traveling across the weather map and brought
with them bad weather. You know how a dropping barometer has always
indicated the coming of bad weather — though we have never quite
known why.

Now it turns out that the barometric low is nothing but one of those
toppling-over waves in the polar front — or rather, it is the way in which
the spiral surging of the air masses affects the barometers. Look at the
Middle West when it is being swept by one of those waves, take a reading

146 THE EARTH

of everybody's barometer, and you get the typical low. Look at it when
a low is centered, watch the kinds of air that are flowing there, the wind
directions, the temperatures and humidities and you find that a low has
a definite internal structure: the typical wave pattern, with a warm air
mass going north and a cold air mass going south, both phases of the same
wave.

Barometric pressures turn out to be not the cause of the weather, but
simply a result, a rather unimportant secondary symptom of it. What
weather actually is the Norwegians have made clear. It is the wave
action of the air ocean.

7942

C. MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Newtoniana

"I do not know what 1 may appear to the world, but to myself I seem
to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble and a prettier shell than or-
dinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." —
Sir Isaac Newton

"If I have seen farther than Descartes, it is by standing on the shoul-
ders of giants." — Sir Isaac Newton

"Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most for-
tunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to estab-
lish."— Lagrange

"There may have been minds as happily constituted as his for the
cultivation of pure mathematical science; there may have been minds
as happily constituted for the cultivation of science purely experimental;
but in no other mind have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive
faculty co-existed in such supreme excellence and perfect harmony." —
Lord Macaulay

"Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time
when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half." —
Leibnitz

"Let Men Rejoice that so great a glory of the human race has ap-
peared."— Inscription on Westminster Tablet

"The law of gravitation is indisputably and incomparably the greatest
scientific discovery ever made, whether we look at the advance which it
involved, the extent of truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfac-
tory nature of this truth." — William Whewell

"Newton's greatest direct contribution to optics, appears to be the
discovery and explanation of the nature of color. He certainly laid the

147

148 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

broad foundation upon which spectrum analysis rests, and out of this has
come the new science of spectroscopy which is the most delicate and
powerful method for the investigation of the structure of matter. — Dayton
C. Miller

"On the day of Cromwell's death, when Newton was sixteen, a great
storm raged all over England. He used to say, in his old age, that on that
day he made his first purely scientific experiment. To ascertain the force
of the wind, he first jumped with the wind and then against it, and by
comparing these distances with the extent of his own jump on a calm
day, he was enabled to compute the force of the storm. When the wind
blew thereafter, he used to say it was so many feet strong. — fames Parton

"His carriage was very meek, sedate and humble, never seemingly
angry, of profound thought, his countenance mild, pleasant and comely.
I cannot say I ever saw him laugh but once, which put me in mind of
the Ephesian philosopher, who laughed only once in his lifetime, to see
an ass eating thistles when plenty of grass was by. He always kept close
to his studies, very rarely went visiting anrJ had few visitors. I never
knew him to take any recreation or pastime either in riding out to take
the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all
hours lost that were not spent in his studies, to which he kept so close
that he seldom left his chamber except at term time, when he read in
the schools as Lucasianus Professor, where so few went to hear him, and
fewer that understood him, that ofttimes he did in a manner, for want
of hearers read to the walls. Foreigners he received with a great deal of
freedom, candour, and respect. When invited to a treat, which was very
seldom, he used to return it very handsomely, and with much satisfac-
tion to himself. So intent, so serious upon his studies, that he ate very
sparingly, nay, ofttimes he has forgot to eat at all, so that, going into his
chamber, I have found his mess untouched, of which, when I have re-
minded him, he would reply — 'Have I?' and then making to the table
would eat a bite or two standing, for I cannot say I ever saw him sit at
table by himself. He very rarely went to bed till two or three of the
clock, sometimes not until five or six, lying about four or five hours,
especially at spring and fall of the leaf, at which times he used to em-
ploy about six weeks in his elaboratory, the fires scarcely going out
either night or day; he sitting up one night and I another till he had fin-
ished his chemical experiments, in the performance of which he was the
most accurate, strict, exact. What his aim might be I was not able to
penetrate into, but his pains, his diligence at these set times made me think
he aimed at something beyond the reach of human art and industry. I

NEWTONIANA 149

cannot say I ever saw him drink either wine, ale or beer, excepting at
meals and then but very sparingly. He very rarely went to dine in the
hall, except on some public days, and then if he has not been minded,
would go very carelessly, with shoes down at heels, stockings untied, sur-
plice on, and his head scarcely combed.

His elaboratory was well furnished with chemical materials, as bodies,
receivers, heads, crucibles, etc. which was made very litle use of, the
crucibles excepted, in which he fused his metals; he would sometimes, tho'
very seldom, look into an old mouldy book which lay in his elaboratory,
I think it was titled Agricola de Metallis, the transmuting of metals being
his chief design, for which purpose antimony was a great ingredient. He
has sometimes taken a turn or two, has made a sudden stand, turn'd
himself about, run up the stairs like another Archimedes, with an Eureka
fall to write on his desk standing without giving himself the leisure to
draw a chair to sit down on. He would with great acuteness answer a
question, but would very seldom start one. Dr. Boerhave, in some of his
writings, speaking of Sir Isaac: 'That man/ says he, "comprehends as
much as all mankind besides.' — Humphrey Newton

"When we review his life, his idiosyncrasies, his periods of contrast,
and his doubts and ambitions and desire for place, may we not take some
pleasure in thinking of him as a man — a man like most other men save
in one particular — he had genius — a greater touch of divinity than comes
to the rest of us? "—David Eugene Smith

Discoveries

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

CONCERNING THE LAW OF GRAVITATION

1THERTO WE HAVE EXPLAINED THE PHAENOMENA

of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have
not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must
proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of the sun and
planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force; that operates
not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which
it acts (as mechanical causes used to do), but according to the quantity
of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all
sides to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate propor-
tions of the distances. Gravitation towards the sun is made up out of the
gravitations towards the several particles of which the body of the sun
is composed; and in receding from the sun decreases accurately in the
duplicate proportion of the distances as far as the orb of Saturn, as evi-
dently appears from the quiescence of the aphelions of the planets; nay,
and even to the remotest aphelions of the comets, if these aphelions are
also quiescent. But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause
of those properties of gravity from phaenomena, and I frame no hypoth-
eses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called
an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether
of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental phi-
losophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the
phaenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was
that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies,
and the laws of motion and gravitation were discovered. And to us it is
enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which
we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions
of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.

From Newton's "Principia" edition of 1726
150

DISCOVERIES 151

LAWS OF MOTION

Law I. Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion
in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force im-
pressed thereon.

Projectiles persevere in their motions, so far as they are not retarded
by the resistance of the air, or impelled downwards by the force of gravity.
A top, whose parts by their cohesion are perpetually drawn aside from
rectilinear motions, does not cease its rotation, otherwise than as it is
retarded by the air. The greater bodies of the planets and comets, meet-
ing with less resistance in more free spaces, preserve their motions both
progressive and circular for a much longer time.

Law II. The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive
force impressed '; and is made in the direction of the right line in which
that force is impressed.

If any force generates a motion, a double force will generate double
the motion, a triple force triple the motion, whether that force be im-
pressed altogether and at once, or gradually and successively. And this
motion (being always directed the same way with the generating force),
if the body moved before, is added to or subducted from the former
motion, according as they directly conspire with or are directly contrary
to each other; or obliquely joined, when they are oblique, so as to pro-
duce a new motion compounded from the determination of both.

Law III. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or
the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and
directed to contrary parts.

Whatever draws or presses another is as much drawn or pressed by
that other. If you press a stone with your finger, the finger is also pressed
by the stone. If a horse draws a stone tied to a rope, the horse (if I may so
say) will be equally drawn back towards the stone; for the distended rope,
by the same endeavor to relax or unbend itself, will draw the horse
as much towards the stone, as it does the stone towards the horse, and
will obstruct the progress of the one as much as it advances that of the
other. If a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the mo-
tion of the other, that body also (because of the equality of the mutual
pressure) will undergo an equal change, in its own motion, towards the
contrary part. The changes made by these actions are equal, not in the
velocities but in the motions of bodies; that is to say, if the bodies are
not hindered by any other impediments. For, because the motions are
equally changed, the changes of the velocities made towards contrary
parts are reciprocally proportional to the bodies.

From Newton's "Principia" edition of 7726

152 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

THE DISPERSION OF LIGHT

In the year 1666 (at which time I applied myself to the grinding of
optick glasses of other figures than spherical) I procured me a trian-
gular glass prism, to try therewith the celebrated phaenomena of colours.
And in order thereto, having darkened my chamber, and made a small
hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the sun's
light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might be thereby re-
fracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertissement,
to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while
applying myself to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised,
to see them in an oblong form; which, according to the received laws
of refraction, I expected should have been circular. They were terminated
at the sides with straight lines, but at the ends, the decay of light was so
gradual that it was difficult to determine justly, what was their figure;
yet they seemed semicircular.

Comparing the length of this coloured Spectrum with its breadth, I
found it about five times greater, a disproportion so extravagant, that it
excited me to a more than ordinary curiosity to examining from whence
it might proceed. I could scarce think, that the various thicknesses of
the glass, or the termination with shadow or darkness, could have any
influence on light to produce such an effect; yet I thought it not amiss,
first to examine those circumstances, and so try'd what would happen
by transmitting light through parts of the glass of divers thicknesses, or
through holes in the window of divers bignesses, or by setting the prism
without, so that the light might pass through it, and be refracted, before
it was terminated by the hole: But I found none of these circumstances
material. The fashion of the colours was in all these cases the same. . . .
The gradual removal of these suspicions led me to the Experimentum
Crucis, which was this: I took two boards, and placed one of them close
behind the prism at the window, so that the light might pass through a
small hole, made in it for the purpose, and fall on the other board, which
I placed at about 12 feet distance, having first made a small hole in it
also, for some of the incident light to pass through. Then I placed an-
other prism behind this second board, so that the light trajected through
both the boards might pass through that also, and be again refracted be-
fore it arrived at the wall. This done, I took the first prism in my hand,
and turned it to and fro slowly about its axis, so much as to make the
several parts of the image cast, on the second board, successively pass
through the hole in it, that I might observe to what places on the wall
the second prism would refract them. And I saw by the variation of those

DISCOVERIES 153

places, that the light, tending to that end of the image, towards which
the refraction of the first prism was made, did in the second prism suffer a
refraction considerably greater than the light tending to the other end.
And so the true cause of the length of that image was detected to be no
other, than that light is not similar or homogenial, but consists of
Difform Rays, some of which are more Refrangible than others; so that
without any difference in their incidence on the same medium, some shall
be more Refracted than others; and therefore that, according to their
particular Degrees of Refrangibility, they were transmitted through the
prism to divers parts of the opposite wall. . . .

On the Origin of Colours

The colours of all natural bodies have no other origin than this, that
they are variously qualified, to reflect one sort of light in greater plenty
than another. And this I have experimented in a dark room, by illumi-
nating those bodies with uncompounded light of divers colours. For by
that means any body may be made to appear of any colour. They have
there no appropriate colour, but ever appear of the colour of the light
cast upon them, but yet with this difference, that they are most brisk
and vivid in the light of their own daylight colour. Minium appeareth
there of any colour indifferently, with which it is illustrated, but yet most
luminous in red, and so bise appeareth indifferently of any colour, but
yet most luminous in blue. And therefore minium reflecteth rays of any
colour, but most copiously those endowed with red, that is, with all
sorts of rays promiscuously blended, those qualified with red shall abound
most in that reflected light, and by their prevalence cause it to appear
of that colour. And for the same reason bise, reflecting blue most copiously,
shall appear blue by the excess of those rays in its reflected light; and
the like of other bodies. And that this is the entire and adequate cause
of their colours, is manifest, because they have no power to change or
alter the colours of any sort of rays incident apart, but put on all colours
indifferently, with which they are enlightened.

These things being so, it can be no longer disputed, whether there be
colours in the dark, or whether they be the qualities of the objects we
see, no nor perhaps, whether light be a body. For, since colours are the
quality of light, having its rays for their entire and immediate subject,
how can we think those rays qualities also, unless one quality may be the
subject of, and sustain another; which in effect is to call it substance.
We should not know bodies for substances; were it not for their sensible
qualities, and the principle of those being now found due to something
else, we have as good reason to believe that to be a substance also.

154 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Besides, who ever thought any quality to be a heterogeneous aggregate,
such as light is discovered to be? But to determine more absolutely what
light is, after what manner refracted, and by what modes or actions it
produceth in our minds the phantasms of colours, is not so easie; and
I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.

From Newton's "A New Theory about Light and Colours," 1672

Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization

LANCELOT HOGBEN

From Mathematics for the Million

npHERE IS A STORY ABOUT DIDEROT, THE

A Encyclopaedist and materialist, a foremost figure in the intellectual
awakening which immediately preceded the French Revolution. Diderot
was staying at the Russian court, where his elegant flippancy was enter-
taining the nobility. Fearing that the faith of her retainers was at stake,
the Tsaritsa commissioned Euler, the most distinguished mathematician
of the time, to debate with Diderot in public. Diderot was informed that a
mathematician had established a proof of the existence of God. He was
summoned to court without being told the name of his opponent. Before
the assembled court, Euler accosted him with the following pronounce-

a + bn

ment, which was uttered with due gravity: " = x, done Dieu

existe repondez!" Algebra was Arabic to Diderot. Unfortunately he did
not realize that was the trouble. Had he realized that algebra is just a
language in which we describe the sizes of things in contrast to the
ordinary languages which we use to describe the sorts of things in the
world, he would have asked Euler to translate the first half of the sentence
into French. Translated freely into English, it may be rendered: "A
number x can be got by first adding a number a to a number b multiplied
bv itself a certain number of timesa and then dividing the whole by the

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 155

number of £'s multiplied together. So God exists after all. What have
you got to say now?" If Diderot had asked Euler to illustrate the first
part of his remark for the clearer understanding of the Russian court,
Euler might have replied that x is 3 when a is i and b is 2 and n is 3, or
that x is 21 when a is 3 and b is 3 and n is 4, and so forth. Euler's troubles
would have begun when the court wanted to know how the second part
of the sentence follows from the first part. Like many of us, Diderot had
stagefright when confronted with a sentence in size language. He left
the court abruptly amid the titters of the assembly, confined himself to
his chambers, demanded a safe conduct, and promptly returned to France.

Though he could not know it, Diderot had the last laugh before the
court of history. The clericalism which Diderot fought was overthrown,
and though it has never lacked the services of an eminent mathematician,
the supernaturalism which Euler defended has been in retreat ever since.
One eminent contemporary astronomer in his Gifford lectures tells us that
Dirac has discovered p and q numbers. Done Dieu existe. Another distin-
guished astronomer pauses, while he entertains us with astonishing calcu-
lations about the distance of the stars, to award M. le grand Architects
an honorary degree in mathematics. There were excellent precedents long
before the times of Euler and Diderot. For the first mathematicians were
the priestly calendar makers who calculated the onset of the seasons. The
Egyptian temples were equipped with nilometers with which the priests
made painstaking records of the rising and falling of the sacred river.
With these they could predict the flooding of the Nile with great accuracy.
Their papyri show that they possessed a language of measurement very
different from the pretentious phraseology with which they fobbed off
their prophecies on the laity. The masses could not see the connection
between prophecy and reality, because the nilometers communicated with
the river by underground channels, skilfully concealed from the eye of
the people. The priests of Egypt used one language when they wrote in
the proceedings of a learned society and another language when they gave
an interview to the "sob sisters" of the Sunday press.

In the ancient world writing and reading were still a mystery and
a craft. The plain man could not decipher the Rhind papyrus in which
the scribe Ahmes wrote down the laws of measuring things. Civilized
societies in the twentieth century have democratized the reading and
writing of sort language. Consequently the plain man can understand
scientific discoveries if they do not involve complicated measurements.
He knows something about evolution. The priestly accounts of the crea-
tion have fallen into discredit. So mysticism has to take refuge in the
atom. The atom is a safe place not because it is small, but because you

156 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

have to do complicated measurements and use underground channels to
find your way there. These underground channels are concealed from
the eye of the people because the plain man has not been taught to read
and write size language. Three centuries ago, when priests conducted
their services in Latin, Protestant reformers founded grammar schools
so that people could read the open bible. The time has now come for
another Reformation. People must learn to read and write the language
of measurement so that they can understand the open bible of modern
science.

In the time of Diderot the lives and happiness of individuals might still
depend on holding the correct beliefs about religion. Today the lives and
happiness of people depend more than most of us realize upon the correct
interpretation of public statistics which are kept by Government offices.
When a committee of experts announce that the average man can live
on his unemployment allowance, or the average child is getting sufficient
milk, the mere mention of an average or the citation of a list of figures
is enough to paralyse intelligent criticism. In reality half or more than
half the population may not be getting enough to live on when the
average man or child has enough. The majority of people living today in
civilized countries cannot read and write freely in size language, just as
the majority of people living in the times of Wycliff and Luther were
ignorant of Latin in which religious controversy was carried on. The
modern Diderot has got to learn the language of size in self-defence,
because no society is safe in the hands of its clever people. . . .

The first men who dwelt in cities were talking animals. The man of
the machine age is a calculating animal. We live in a welter of figures:
cookery recipes, railway time-tables, unemployment aggregates, fines,
taxes, war debts, overtime schedules, speed limits, bowling averages,
betting odds, billiard scores, calories, babies' weights, clinical temperatures,
rainfall, hours of sunshine, motoring records, power indices, gas-meter
readings, bank rates, freight rates, death rates, discount, interest, lotteries,
wave lengths, and tyre pressures. Every night, when he winds up his
watch, the modern man adjusts a scientific instrument of a precision and
delicacy unimaginable to the most cunning artificers of Alexandria in its
prime. So much is commonplace. What escapes our notice is that in doing
these things we have learnt to use devices which presented tremendous
difficulties to the most brilliant mathematicians of antiquity. Ratios, limits,
acceleration, are not remote abstractions, dimly apprehended by the
solitary genius. They are photographed upon every page of our existence.
We have no difficulty in answering questions which tortured the minds
of very clever mathematicians in ancient times. This is not because you

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 157

and I are very clever people. It is because we inherit a social culture which
has suffered the impact of material forces foreign to the intellectual life
of the ancient world. The most brilliant intellect is a prisoner within its
own social inheritance.

An illustration will help to make this quite definite at the outset. The
Eleatic philosopher Zeno set all his contemporaries guessing by propound-
ing a series of conundrums, of which the one most often quoted is the
paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Here is the problem about which
the inventors of school geometry argued till they had speaker's throat and
writer's cramp. Achilles runs a race with the tortoise. He runs ten times
as fast as the tortoise. The tortoise has 100 yards' start. Now, says Zeno,
Achilles runs 100 yards and reaches the place where the tortoise started.
Meanwhile the tortoise has gone a tenth as far as Achilles, and is therefore
10 yards ahead of Achilles. Achilles runs this 10 yards. Meanwhile the
tortoise has run a tenth as far as Achilles, and is therefore i yard in front
of him. Achilles runs this i yard. Meanwhile the tortoise has run a tenth
of a yard and is therefore a tenth of a yard in front of Achilles. Achilles
runs this tenth of a yard. Meanwhile the tortoise goes a tenth of a tenth
of a yard. He is now a hundredth of a yard in front of Achilles. When
Achilles has caught up this hundredth of a yard, the tortoise is a thou-
sandth of a yard in front. So, argued Zeno, Achilles is always getting
nearer the tortoise, but can never quite catch him up.

You must not imagine that Zeno and all the wise men who argued the
point failed to recognize that Achilles really did get past the tortoise.
What troubled them was, where is the catch? You may have been asking
the same question. The important point is that you did not ask it for the
same reason which prompted them. What is worrying you is why they
thought up funny little riddles of that sort. Indeed, what you are really
concerned with is an historical problem. I am going to show you in a
minute that the problem is not one which presents any mathematical
difficulty to you. You know how to translate it into size language, because
you inherit a social culture which is separated from theirs by the collapse
of two great civilizations and by two great social revolutions. The
difficulty of the ancients was not an historical difficulty. It was a mathe-
matical difficulty. They had not evolved a size language into which this
problem could be freely translated.

The Greeks were not accustomed to speed limits and passenger-luggage
allowances. They found any problem involving division very much more
difficult than a problem involving multiplication. They had no way of
doing division to any order of accuracy, because they relied for calculation
on the mechanical aid of the counting frame or abacus. They could no^

158 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

do sums on paper. For all these and other reasons which we shall meet
again and again, the Greek mathematician was unable to see something
that we see without taking the trouble to worry about whether we see
it or not. If we go on piling up bigger and bigger quantities, the pile goes
on growing more rapidly without any end as long as we go on adding
more. If we can go on adding larger and larger quantities indefinitely
without coming to a stop, it seemed to Zeno's contemporaries that we
ought to be able to go on adding smaller and still smaller quantities
indefinitely without reaching a limit. They thought that in one case the
pile goes on for ever, growing more rapidly, and in the other it goes on
for ever, growing more slowly. There was nothing in their number
language to suggest that when the engine slows beyond a certain point,
it chokes off.

To see this clearly we will first put down in numbers the distance which
the tortoise traverses at different stages of the race after Achilles starts.
As we have described it above, the tortoise moves 10 yards in stage i,
i yard in stage 2, one-tenth of a yard in stage 3, one-hundredth of a yard
in stage 4, etc. Suppose we had a number language like the Greeks and
Romans, or the Hebrews, who used letters of the alphabet. Using the one
that is familiar to us because it is still used for clocks, graveyards, and
law-courts, we might write the total of all the distances the tortoise ran
before Achilles caught him up like this:

X + I + TT + -77 + 77 and so on.
ACM

We have put "and so on" because the ancient peoples got into great
difficulties when they had to handle numbers more than a few thousands.
Apart from the fact that we have left the tail of the series to your imagi-
nation (and do not forget that the tail is most of the animal if it goes on
for ever), notice another disadvantage about this script. There is absolutely
nothing to suggest to you how the distances at each stage of the race are
connected with one another. Today we have a number vocabulary which
makes this relation perfectly evident, when we write it down as:

i i i i i i

10 + i H 1 1 1 1 1 and so on.

10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000

In this case we put "and so on" to save ourselves trouble, not because
we have not the right number-words. These number-words were bor-
rowed from the Hindus, who learnt to write number language after
Zeno and Euclid had gone to their graves. A social revolution, the

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 159

Protestant Reformation, gave us schools which made this number
language the common property of mankind. A second social upheaval,
the French Revolution, taught us to use a reformed spelling. Thanks
to the Education Acts of the nineteenth century, this reformed spelling
is part of the common fund of knowledge shared by almost every sane
individual in the English-speaking world. Let us write the last total,
using this reformed spelling, which we call decimal notation. That is to
say:

10 + i + o-i + o-oi + o-ooi + o-oooi + o-ooooi + ooooooi and so on.

We have only to use the reformed spelling to remind ourselves that this
can be put in a more snappy form :

iriiiiii etc.,
or still better:

ii'i.

We recognize the fraction o-i as a quantity that is less than -ny and more
than -fa. If we have not forgotten the arithmetic we learned at school, we
may even remember that o-i corresponds with the fraction %. This means
that, the longer we make the sum, o-i + o-oi 4- o-ooi, etc., the nearer it
gets to £, and it never grows bigger than £. The total of all the yards
the tortoise moves till there is no distance between himself and Achilles
makes up just ii£ yards, and no more.

You will now begin to see what was meant by saying that the riddle
presents no mathematical difficulty to you. You have a number language
constructed so that it can take into account a possibility which mathema-
ticians describe by a very impressive name. They call it the convergence
of an infinite series to a limiting value. Put in plain words, this only
means that, if you go on piling up smaller and smaller quantities as long
as you can, you may get a pile of which the size is not made measurably
larger by adding any more. The immense difficulty which the mathema-
ticians of the ancient world experienced when they dealt with a process
of division carried on indefinitely, or with what modern mathematicians
call infinite series, limits, transcendental numbers, irrational quantities,
and so forth, provides an example of a great social truth borne out by
the whole history of human knowledge. Fruitful intellectual activity of
the cleverest people draws its strength from the common knowledge
which all of us share. Beyond a certain point clever people can never
transcend the limitations of the social culture they inherit. When clever
people pride themselves on their own isolation, we may well wonder
whether they are very clever after all. Our studies in mathematics are

160 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

going to show us that whenever the culture of a people loses contact
with the common life of mankind and becomes exclusively the plaything
of a leisure class, it is becoming a priestcraft. It is destined to end, as does
all priestcraft, in superstition. To be proud of intellectual isolation from
the common life of mankind and to be disdainful of the great social task
of education is as stupid as it is wicked. It is the end of progress in knowl-
edge. History shows that superstitions are not manufactured by the plain
man. They are invented by neurotic intellectuals with too little to do.
The mathematician and the plain man each need one another. Maybe the
Western world is about to be plunged irrevocably into barbarism. If it
escapes this fate, the men and women of the leisure state which is now
within our grasp will regard the democratization of mathematics as a
decisive step in the advance of civilization.

In such a time as ours the danger of retreat into barbarism is very real.
We may apply to mathematics the words in which Cobbett explained the
uses of grammar to the working men of his own day when there was no
public system of free schools. In the first of his letters on English gram-
mar for a working boy, Cobbett wrote these words: "But, to the acquiring
of this branch of knowledge, my dear son, there is one motive, which,
though it ought, at all times, to be strongly felt, ought, at the present
time, to be so felt in an extraordinary degree. I mean that desire which
every man, and especially every young man, should entertain to be able
to assert with effect the rights and liberties of his country. When you
come to read the history of those Laws of England by which the freedom
of the people has been secured . . . you will find that tyranny has no
enemy so formidable as the pen. And, while you will see with exultation
the long-imprisoned, the heavily-fined, the banished William Prynne,
returning to liberty, borne by the people from Southampton to London,
over a road strewed with flowers: then accusing, bringing to trial and to
the block, the tyrants from whose hands he and his country had unjustly
and cruelly suffered; while your heart and the heart of every young man
in the kingdom will bound with joy at the spectacle, you ought all to bear
in mind, that, without a knowledge of grammar, Mr. Prynne could
never have performed any of those acts by which his name has been
thus preserved, and which have caused his name to be held in honour."

Today economic tyranny has no more powerful friend than the cal-
culating prodigy. Without a knowledge of mathematics, the grammar
of size and order, we cannot plan the rational society in which there will
be leisure for all and poverty for none. If we are inclined to be a little
afraid of the prospect, our first step towards understanding this grammar
is to realize that the reasons which repel many people from studying

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 161

it are not at all discreditable. As mathematics has been taught and
expounded in schools no effort is made to show its social history, its
significance in our own social lives, the immense dependence of civilized
mankind upon it. Neither as children nor as adults are we told how the
knowledge of this grammar has been used again and again throughout
history to assist in the liberation of mankind from superstition. We are
not shown how it may be used by us to defend the liberties of the people.
Let us see why this is so.

The educational system of North- Western Europe was largely moulded
by three independent factors in the period of the Reformation. One was
linguistic in the ordinary sense. To weaken the power of the Church as
an economic overlord it was necessary to destroy the influence of the
Church on the imagination of the people. The Protestant Reformers
appealed to the recognized authority of scripture to show that the priestly
practices were innovations. They had to make the scriptures an open book.
The invention of printing was the mechanical instrument which destroyed
the intellectual power of the Pope. Instruction in Latin and Greek was
a corollary of the doctrine of the open bible. This prompted the great
educational innovation of John Knox and abetted the more parsimonious
founding of grammar schools in England. The ideological front against
popery and the wealthy monasteries strengthened its strategic position by
new translations and critical inspection of the scriptural texts. That is one
reason why classical scholarship occupied a place of high honour in the
educational system of the middle classes.

The language of size owes its position in Western education to two dif-
ferent social influences. While revolt against the authority of the Church
was gathering force, and before the reformed doctrine had begun to have
a wide appeal for the merchants and craftsmen of the medieval boroughs,
the mercantile needs of the Hansa had already led to the founding of
special schools in Germany for the teaching of the new arithmetic which
Europe had borrowed from the Arabs. An astonishing proportion of the
books printed in the three years after the first press was set up were com-
mercial arithmetics. Luther vindicated the four merchant gospels of
addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with astute political
sagacity when he announced the outlandish doctrine that every boy should
be taught to calculate. The grammar of numbers was chained down to
commercial uses before people could foresee the vast variety of ways in
which it was about to invade man's social life.

Geometry, already divorced from the art of calculation, did not enter
into Western education by the same route. Apart from the stimulus which
the study of dead languages received from the manufacture of bibles,

162 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

classical pursuits were encouraged because the political theories of the
Greek philosophers were congenial to the merchants who were aspiring to
a limited urban democracy. The appeal of the city-state democracy to the
imagination of the wealthier bourgeois lasted till after the French Revolu-
tion, when it was laid to rest in the familiar funeral urns of mural decora-
tion. The leisure class of the Greek city-states played with geometry as
people play with crossword puzzles and chess today. Plato taught that
geometry was the highest exercise to which human leisure could be
devoted. So geometry became included in European education as a part of
classical scholarship, without any clear connection with the contemporary
reality of measuring Drake's "world encompassed." Those who taught
Euclid did not understand its social use, and generations of schoolboys
have studied Euclid without being told how a later geometry, which
grew out of Euclid's teaching in the busy life of Alexandria, made it
possible to measure the size of the world. Those measurements blew up
the pagan Pantheon of star gods and blazed the trail for the great naviga-
tions. The revelation of how much of the surface of our world was still
unexplored was the solid ground for what we call the faith of Columbus.
Plato's exaltation of mathematics as an august and mysterious ritual had
its roots in dark superstitions which troubled, and fanciful puerilities
which entranced, people who were living through the childhood of
civilization, when even the cleverest people could not clearly distinguish
the difference between saying that 13 is a "prime" number and saying
that 13 is an unlucky number. His influence on education has spread a veil
of mystery over mathematics and helped to preserve the queer freemasonry
of the Pythagorean brotherhoods, whose members were put to death for
revealing mathematical secrets now printed in school books. It reflects
no discredit on anybody if this veil of mystery makes the subject distaste-
ful. Plato's great achievement was to invent a religion which satisfies the
emotional needs of people who are out of harmony with their social
environment, and just too intelligent or too individualistic to seek
sanctuary in the cruder forms of animism. The curiosity of the men who
first speculated about atoms, studied the properties of the lodestone,
watched the result of rubbing amber, dissected animals, and catalogued
plants in the three centuries before Aristotle wrote his epitaph on Greek
science, had banished personalities from natural and familiar objects.
Plato placed animism beyond the reach of experimental exposure by
inventing a world of "universals." This world of universals was the world
as God knows it, the "real" world of which our own is but the shadow.
In this "real" world symbols of speech and number are invested with the

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 163

magic which departed from the bodies of beasts and the trunks of trees
as soon as they were dissected and described. . . .

Two views are commonly held about mathematics. One comes from
Plato. This is that mathematical statements represent eternal truths. Plato's
doctrine was used by the German philosopher, Kant, as a stick with which
to beat the materialists of his time, when revolutionary writings like those
of Diderot were challenging priestcraft. Kant thought that the principles
of geometry were eternal, and that they were totally independent of our
sense organs. It happened that Kant wrote just before biologists dis-
covered that we have a sense organ, part of what is called the internal ear,
sensitive to the pull of gravitation. Since that discovery, the significance
of which was first fully recognized by the German physicist, Ernst Mach,
the geometry which Kant knew has been brought down to earth by
Einstein. It no longer dwells in the sky where Plato put it. We know
that geometrical statements when applied to the real world are only
approximate truths. The theory of Relativity has been very unsettling
to mathematicians, and it has now become a fashion to say that mathemat-
ics is only a game. Of course, this does not tell us anything about mathe-
matics. It only tells us something about the cultural limitations of some
mathematicians. When a man says that mathematics is a game, he is
making a private statement. He is telling us something about himself, his
own attitude to mathematics. He is not telling us anything about the
public meaning of a mathematical statement,

If mathematics is a game, there is no reason why people should play it
if they do not want to. With football, it belongs to those amusements
without which life would be endurable. The view which we explore is that
mathematics is the language of size, and that it is an essential part of the
equipment of an intelligent citizen to understand this language. If the
rules of mathematics are rules of grammar, there is no stupidity involved
when we fail to see that a mathematical truth is obvious. The rules of
ordinary grammar are not obvious. They have to be learned. They are not
eternal truths. They are conveniences without whose aid truths about
the sorts of things in the world cannot be communicated from one person
to another. In Cobbett's memorable words, Mr. Prynne would not have
been able to impeach Archbishop Laud if his command of grammar
had been insufficient to make himself understood. So it is with mathe-
matics, the grammar of size. The rules of mathematics are rules to be
learned. If they are formidable, they are formidable because they are
unfamiliar when you first meet them — like gerunds or nominative ab-
solutes. They are also formidable because in all languages there are so
many rules and words to memorize before we can read newspapers or

164 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

pick up radio news from foreign stations. Everybody knows that being
able to chatter in several foreign languages is not a sign of great social
intelligence. Neither is being able to chatter in the language of size. Real
social intelligence lies in the use of a language, in applying the right
words in the right context. It is important to know the language of size,
because entrusting the laws of human society, social statistics, population,
man's hereditary make-up, the balance of trade, to the isolated mathema-
tician without checking his conclusions is like letting a committee of
philologists manufacture the truths of human, animal, or plant anatomy
from the resources of their own imaginations.

. . . The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life,
because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages
of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or
of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial
nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense com-
plexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness
to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different
kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday
life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has
not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a
clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered
by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowa-
days people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or
Pediculus, because these words are only used by people who use them in
one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when
they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of man's
social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about
the "withering away of the State" may disclose a difference about the
use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the police-
man is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about
the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often
slow to see the need for creating a rational and international language.

The technique of measurement and counting has followed the caravans
and galleys of the great trade routes. It has developed very slowly. At
least four thousand years intervened between the time when men could
calculate when the next eclipse would occur and the time when men could
calculate how much iron is present in the sun. Between the first recorded
observations of electricity produced by friction and the measurement of
the attraction of an electrified body two thousand years intervened. Per-
haps a longer period separates the knowledge of magnetic iron (or lode-
stone) and the measurement of magnetic force. Classifying things accord-

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 165

ing to size has been a much harder task than recognizing the different sorts
of things there are. It has been more closely related to man's social achieve-
ments than to his biological equipment. Our eyes and ears can recognize
different sorts of things at a great distance. To measure things at a dis-
tance, man has had to make new sense organs for himself, like the
astrolabe, the telescope, and the microphone. He has made scales which
reveal differences of weight to which our hands are quite insensitive. At
each stage in the evolution of the tools of measurement man has refined
the tools of size language. As human inventiveness has turned from the
counting of flocks and seasons to the building of temples, from the build-
ing of temples to the steering of ships into chartless seas, from seafaring
plunder to machines driven by the forces of dead matter, new languages
of size have sprung up in succession. Civilizations have risen and fallen.
At each stage a more primitive, less sophisticated culture breaks through
the barriers of custom thought, brings fresh rules to the grammar of
measurement, bearing within itself the limitation of further growth and the
inevitability that it will be superseded in its turn. The history of mathe-
matics is the mirror of civilization.

The beginnings of a size language are to be found in the priestly
civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria. From these ancient civilizations we
see the first-fruits of secular knowledge radiated along the inland trade
routes to China and pushing out into and beyond the Mediterranean,
where the Semitic peoples are sending forth ships to trade in tin and dyes.
The more primitive northern invaders of Greece and Asia Minor collect
and absorb the secrets of the pyramid makers in cities where a priestly
caste is not yet established. As the Greeks become prosperous, geometry
becomes a plaything. Greek thought itself becomes corrupted with the
star worship of the ancient world. At the very point when it seems almost
inevitable that geometry will make way for a new language, it ceases to
develop further. The scene shifts to Alexandria, the greatest centre of ship-
ping and the mechanical arts in the ancient world. Men are thinking about
how much of the world remains to be explored. Geometry is applied to the
measurement of the heavens. Trigonometry takes its place. The size of the
earth, the distance of the sun and moon are measured. The star gods are
degraded. In the intellectual life of Alexandria, the factory of world
religions, the old syncretism has lost its credibility. It may still welcome
a god beyond the sky. It is losing faith in the gods within the sky.

In Alexandria, where the new language of star measurement has its
beginnings, men are thinking about numbers unimaginably large
compared with the numbers which the Greek intellect could grasp.
Anaxagoras had shocked the court of Pericles by declaring that the sun

166 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

was as immense as the mainland of Greece, Now Greece itself had sunk
into insignificance beside the world of which Eratosthenes and Poseidonius
had measured the circumference. The world itself sank into insignifi-
cance beside the sun as Aristarchus had measured it. Ere the dark night of
monkish superstition engulfed the great cosmopolis of antiquity, men were
groping for new means of calculation. The bars of the counting frame had
become the bars of a cage in which the intellectual life of Alexandria was
imprisoned. Men like Diophantus and Theon were using geometrical
diagrams to devise crude recipes for calculation. They had almost invented
the third new language of algebra. That they did not succeed was the
nemesis of the social culture they inherited. In the East the Hindus had
started from a much lower level. Without the incubus of an old-established
vocabulary of number, they had fashioned new symbols which lent them-
selves to simple calculation without mechanical aids. The Moslem civiliza-
tion which swept across the southern domain of the Roman Empire
brought together the technique of measurement, as it had evolved in the
hands of the Greeks and the Alexandrians, adding the new instrument
for handling numbers which was developed through the invention of the
Hindu number symbols. In the hands of Arabic mathematicians like Omar
Khayyam, the main features of a language of calculation took shape. We
still call it by the Arabic name, algebra. We owe algebra and the pattern
of modern European poetry to a non-Aryan people who would be excluded
from the vote in the Union of South Africa.

Along the trade routes this new arithmetic is brought into Europe
by Jewish scholars from the Moorish universities of Spain and by Gentile
merchants trading with the Levant, some of them patronized by nobles
whose outlook had been unintentionally broadened by the Crusades.
Europe stands on the threshold of the great navigations. Seafarers are
carrying Jewish astronomers who can use the star almanacs which Arab
scholarship had prepared. The merchants are becoming rich. More than
ever the world is thinking in large numbers. The new arithmetic or
"algorithm" sponsors an amazing device which was prompted by the need
for more accurate tables of star measurement for use in seafaring. Loga-
rithms were among the cultural first-fruits of the great navigations. Mathe-
maticians are thinking in maps, in latitude and longitude. A new kind
of geometry (what we call graphs in everyday speech) was an inevitable
consequence. This new geometry of Descartes contains something which
Greek geometry had left out. In the leisurely world of antiquity there were
no clocks. In the bustling world of the great navigations mechanical
clocks are displacing the ancient ceremonial function of the priesthood as
timekeepers. A geometry which could represent time and a religion in

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION 167

which there were no saints' days are emerging from the same social
context. From this geometry of time a group of men who were studying
the mechanics of the pendulum clock and making fresh discoveries about
the motion of the planets devised a new size language to measure motion.
Today we call it "the" calculus.

This crude outline of the history of mathematics as a mirror of civiliza-
tion, interlocking with man's common culture, his inventions, his economic
arrangements, his religious beliefs, may be left at the stage which had been
reached when Newton died. What has happened since has been largely
the filling of gaps, the sharpening of instruments already devised. Here
and there are indications of a new sort of mathematics. We see a hint of
it in social statistics and the study of the atom. We begin to see possi-
bilities of new languages of size transcending those we now use, as the
calculus of movement gathered into itself all that had gone before.

1937

Experiments and Ideas

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

THE KITE

As frequent mention is made in public papers from Europe of the
success of the Philadelphia experiment for drawing the electric fire from
clouds by means of pointed rods of iron erected on high buildings, &, it
may be agreeable to the curious to be informed, that the same experi-
ment has succeeded in Philadelphia, though made in a different and
more easy manner, which is as follows:

Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to
reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when extended;
tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you
have the body of a kite; which being properly accommodated with a
tail, loop, and string, will rise in the air, like those made of paper; but
this being of silk, is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder-gust
without tearing. To the top of the upright stick of the cross is to be fixed
a very sharp pointed wire, rising a foot or more above the wood. To
the end of the twine, next the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon, and where
the silk and twine join, a key may be fastened. This kite is to be raised
when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, and the person who holds
the string must stand within a door or window or under some cover,
so that the silk ribbon may not be wet; and care must be taken that the
twine does not touch the frame of the door or window. As soon as any of
the thunder-clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the
electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine, will be electrified,
and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way, and be
attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wet the kite
and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it
stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle.
At this key the phial may charged; and from electric fire thus obtained,
spirits may be kindled, and all the other electric experiments be per-

168

EXPERIMENTS AND IDEAS 169

formed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or
tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning
completely demonstrated. Letter to Peter Collinson, 1752

ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTS AND ELECTROCUTION

Your question, how I came first to think of proposing the experiment
of drawing down the lightning, in order to ascertain its sameness with
the electric fluid, I cannot answer better than by giving you an extract
from the minutes I used to keep of the experiments I made, with
memorandums of such as I purposed to make, the reasons for making
them, and the observations that arose upon them, from which minutes my
letters were afterwards drawn. By this extract you will see, that the
thought was not so much "an out-of-the-way one," but that it might
have occurred to any electrician.

"November 7, 1749. Electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these par-
ticulars, i. Giving light. 2. Colour of the light. 3. Crooked direction.
4. Swift motion. 5. Being conducted by metals. 6. Crack or noise in explod-
ing. 7. Subsisting in water or ice. 8. Rending bodies it passes through.
9. Destroying animals. 10. Melting metals, n. Firing inflammable sub-
stances. 12. Sulphureous smell. The electric fluid is attracted by points.
We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they
agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not
probable they agree likewise in this ? Let the experiment be made." . . „

The knocking down of the six men was performed with two of my
large jarrs not fully charged. I laid one end of my discharging rod upon
the head of the first; he laid his hand on the head of the second; the
second his hand on the head of the third, and so to the last, who held,
in his hand, the chain that was connected with the outside of the jarrs.
When they were thus placed, I applied the other end of my rod to the
prime-conductor, and they all dropt together. When they got up, they all
declared they had not felt any stroke, and wondered how they came to
fall; nor did any of them either hear the crack, or see the light of it.
You suppose it a dangerous experiment; but I had once suffered the same
myself, receiving, by accident, an equal stroke through my head, that
struck me down, without hurting me: And I had seen a young woman,
that was about to be electrified through the feet, (for some indisposition)
receive a greater charge through the head, by inadvertently stooping for-
ward to look at the placing of her feet, till her forhead (as she was very
tall) came too near my prime-conductor: she dropt, but instantly got up

170 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

again, complaining o£ nothing. A person so struck, sinks down doubled,
or folded together as it were, the joints losing their strength and stiffness
at once, so that he drops on the spot where he stood, instantly, and there
is no previous staggering, nor does he ever fall lengthwise. Too great a
charge might, indeed, kill a man, but I have not yet seen any hurt done
by it. It would certainly, as you observe, be the easiest of all deaths. . . -

Letter to John Lining, 7755

ORIGIN OF NORTHEAST STORMS

Agreeable to your request, I send you my reasons for thinking that our
northeast storms in North America begin first, in point of time, in the
southwest parts: That is to say, the air in Georgia, the farthest of our
colonies to the Southwest, begins to move southwesterly before the air
of Carolina, which is the next colony northeastward; the air of Carolina
has the same motion before the air of Virginia, which lies still more
northeastward; and so on northeasterly through Pennsylvania, New-York,
New-England, &c., quite to Newfoundland.

These northeast storms are generally very violent, continue sometimes
two or three days, and often do considerable damage in the harbours
along the coast. They are attended with thick clouds and rain.

What first gave me this idea, was the following circumstance. About
twenty years ago, a few more or less, I cannot from my memory be cer-
tain, we were to have an eclipse of the moon at Philadelphia, on a Fri-
day evening, about nine o'clock. I intended to observe it, but was pre-
vented by a northeast storm, which came on about seven, with thick
clouds as usual, that quite obscured the whole hemisphere. Yet when the
post brought us the Boston newspaper, giving an account of the effects
of the same storm in those parts, I found the beginning of the eclipse
had been well observed there, though Boston lies N. E. of Philadelphia
about 400 miles. This puzzled me because the storm began with us so
soon as to prevent any observation, and being a N. E. storm, I imagined
it must have begun rather sooner in places farther to the northeastward
than it did at Philadelphia. I therefore mentioned it in a letter to my
brother, who lived at Boston; and he informed me the storm did not
begin with them till near eleven o'clock, so that they had a good observa-
tion of the eclipse: And upon comparing all the other accounts I received
from the several colonies, of the time of beginning of the same storm, and,
since that of other storms of the same kind, 1^ found the beginning to
be always later the farther northeastward. I have not my notes with me

EXPERIMENTS AND IDEAS 171

here in England, and cannot, from memory, say the proportion o£ time
to distance, but I think it is about an hour to every hundred miles.

From thence I formed an idea of the cause of these storms, which I
would explain by a familiar instance or two. Suppose a long canal of
water stopp'd at the end by a gate. The water is quite at rest till the
gate is open, then it begins to move out through the gate; the water next
the gate is first in motion, and moves towards the gate; the water next
to that first water moves next, and so on successively, till the water at
the head of the canal is in motion, which is last of all. In this case all the
water moves indeed towards the gate, but the successive times of begin-
ning motion are the contrary way, viz. from the gate backwards to the
head of the canal. Again, suppose the air in a chamber at rest, no cur-
rent through the room till you make a fire in the chimney. Immediately
the air in the chimney, being rarefied by the fire, rises; the air next the
chimney flows in to supply its place, moving towards the chimney; and,
in consequence, the rest of the air successively, quite back to the door.
Thus to produce our northeast storms, I suppose some great heat and
rarefaction of the air in or about the Gulph of Mexico; the air thence
rising has its place supplied by the next more northern, cooler, and there-
fore denser and heavier, air; that, being in motion, is followed by the
next more northern air, &c. &c., in a successive current, to which current
our coast and inland ridge of mountains give the direction of northeast,
as they lie N.E. and S.W. Letter to Alexander Small, 1760

A PROPHECY OF AERIAL INVASION

I have this day received your favor of the 2d inst. Every information
in my power, respecting the balloons, I sent you just before Christmas,
contained in copies of my letters to Sir Joseph Banks. There is no secret
in the affair, and I make no doubt that a person coming from you would
easily obtain a sight of the different balloons of Montgolfier and Charles,
with all the instructions wanted; and, if you undertake to make one,
I think it extremely proper and necessary to send an ingenious man here
for that purpose; otherwise, for want of attention to some particular cir-
cumstance, or of not being acquainted with it, the experiment might mis-
carry, which, in an affair of so much public expectation, would have
bad consequences, draw upon you a great deal of censure, and affect your
reputation. It is a serious thing to draw out from their affairs all the
inhabitants of a great city and its environs, and a disappointment makes
them angry. At Bourdeaux lately a person who pretended to send up a
balloon, and had received money from many people, not being able to

172 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

make it rise, the populace were so exasperated that they pulled down his
house and had like to have killed him.

It appears, as you observe, to be a discovery of great importance, and
what may possibly give a new turn to human affairs. Convincing
sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect of it; since it will
be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions.
Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost
more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford
so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as that ten thousand
men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infi-
nite deal of mischief, before a force could be brought together to repel
them? , . . Letter to Jan Ingcnhousz, 1784

DAYLIGHT SAVING

You often entertain us with accounts of new discoveries. Permit me to
communicate to the public, through your paper, one that has lately been
made by myself, and which I conceive may be of great utility.

I was the other evening in a grand company, where the new lamp of
Messrs. Quinquet and Lange was introduced, and much admired for its
splendour; but a general inquiry was made, whether the oil it consumed
was not in proportion to the light it afforded, in which case there would
be no saving in the use of it. No one present could satisfy us in that
point, which all agreed ought to be known, it being a very desirable
thing to lessen, if possible, the expense of lighting our apartments, when
every other article of family expense was so much augmented.

I was pleased to see this general concern for economy, for I love economy
exceedingly.

I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my
head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise waked me about six
in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light;
and I imagined at first, that a number of those lamps had been brought
into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the win-
dows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it,
when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from where he poured
his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently
omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.

I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but
six o'clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun
should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the
hour given for his rising on that day. I looked forward, too, and found he

EXPERIMENTS AND IDEAS 173

was to rise still earlier every day till towards the end of June; and that
at no time in the year he retarded his rising so long as till eight o'clock.
Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before
noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as
much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and
especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I
am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more
certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated
this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely
the same result. . . .

This event has given rise in my mind to several serious and important
reflections. I considered that, if I had not been awakened so early in the
morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun,
and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-
light; and, the latter being a much more expensive light than the former,
my love of economy induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was
master of, and to make some calculations, which I shall give you, after
observing that utility is, in my opinion the test of value in matters of
invention, and that a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not
good for something, is good for nothing.

I took for the basis of my calculation the supposition that there are one
hundred thousand families in Paris, and that these families consume in
the night half a pound of bougies, or candles, per hour. I think this is a
moderate allowance, taking one family with another; for though, I believe
some consume less, I know that many consume a great deal more. Then
estimating seven hours per day as the medium quantity between the
time of the sun's rising and ours, he rising during the six following
months from six to eight hours before noon, and there being seven hours
of course per night in which we burn candles, the account will stand
thus; —

In the six months between the 20th of March and the 2oth of September,
there are

Nights 183

Hours of each night in which we burn candles 7

Multiplication gives for the total number of hours 1,281

These 1,281 hours multiplied by 100,000, the number of

inhabitants, give 128,100,000

One hundred twenty-eight millions and one hundred thousand
hours, spent at Paris by candle-light, which, at half a pound
of wax and tallow per hour, gives the weight of 64,050,000

174 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Sixty-four millions and fifty thousand of pounds, which, esti-
mating the whole at the medium price of thirty sols the
pound, makes the sum of ninety-six millions and seventy-
five thousand livres tournois 96,075,000

An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the
economy of using sunshine instead of candles. . . .

Letter to the Authors of "The Journal of Paris," 1784

BIFOCALS

By Mr. Dollond's saying, that my double spectacles can only serve par-
ticular eyes, I doubt he has not been rightly informed of their construc-
tion. I imagine it will be found pretty generally true, that the same
convexity of glass, through which a man sees clearest and best at the
distance proper for reading, is not the best for greater distances. I there-
fore had formerly two pair of spectacles, which I shifted occasionally, as
in travelling I sometimes read, and often wanted to regard the prospects.
Finding this change troublesome, and not always sufficiently ready, I had
the glasses cut, and half of each kind associated in the same circle. . . .

By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move
my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper
glasses being always ready. This I find more particularly convenient since
my being in France, the glasses that serve me best at table to see what
I eat, not being the best to see the faces of those on the other side of the
table who speak to me; and when one's ears are not well accustomed to
the sounds of a language, a sight of the movements in the features of him
that speaks helps to explain; so that I understand French better by the
help of my spectacles. Letter to George Whatley, 1785

Exploring the Atom

SIR JAMES JEANS

From The Universe Around Us

AS FAR BACK AS THE FIFTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST,
-£*» Greek philosophy was greatly exercised by the question of whether
in the last resort the ultimate substance of the universe was continuous or
discontinuous. We stand on the sea-shore, and all around us see stretches
of sand which appear at first to be continuous in structure, but which a
closer examination shews to consist of separate hard particles or grains.
In front rolls the ocean, which also appears at first to be continuous in
structure, and this we find we cannot divide into grains or particles, no
matter how we try. We can divide it into drops, but then each drop can
be subdivided into smaller drops, and there seems to be no reason, on the
face of things, why this process of subdivision should not be continued
for ever. The question which agitated the Greek philosophers was, in
effect, whether the water of the ocean or the sand of the sea-shore gave
the truest picture of the ultimate structure of the substance of the universe.

The "atomic" school, founded by Dernocritus, Leucippus and Lucretius,
believed in the ultimate discontinuity of matter; they taught that any
substance, after it had been subdivided a sufficient number of times, would
be found to consist of hard discrete particles which did not admit of
further subdivision. For them the sand gave a better picture of ultimate
structure than the water, because they thought that sufficient subdivision
would cause the water to display the granular properties of sand. And this
intuitional conjecture is amply confirmed by modern science.

The question is, in effect, settled as soon as a thin layer of a substance
is found to shew qualities essentially different from those of a slightly
thicker layer. A layer of yellow sand swept uniformly over a red floor
will make the whole floor appear yellow if there is enough sand to make
a layer at least one grain thick. If, however, there is only half this much
sand, the redness of the floor inevitably shews through; it is impossible
to spread sand in a uniform layer only half a grain thick. This abrupt

175

176 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

change in the properties of a layer o£ sand is of course a consequence of
the granular structure of sand.

Similar changes are found to occur in the properties of thin layers of
liquid. A teaspoonful of soup will cover the bottom of a soup plate, but a
single drop of soup will only make an untidy splash. In some cases it is
possible to measure the exact thickness of layer at which the properties
of liquids begin to change. In 1890 Lord Rayleigh found that thin films
of olive oil floating on water changed their properties entirely as soon as
the thickness of the film was reduced to below a millionth of a millimetre
(or a 25,ooo,oooth part of an inch). The obvious interpretation, which is
confirmed in innumerable ways, is that olive oil consists of discrete
particles — analogous to the "grains" in a pile of sand — each having a
diameter somewhere in the neighbourhood of a 25,ooo,oooth part of an
inch.

Every substance consists of such "grains"; they are called molecules.
The familiar properties of matter are those of layers many molecules
thick; the properties of layers less than a single molecule thick are known
only to the physicist in his laboratory.

MOLECULES

How are we to break up a piece of substance into its ultimate grains,
or molecules? It is easy for the scientist to say that, by subdividing water
for long enough, we shall come to grains which cannot be subdivided any
further; the plain man would like to see it done.

Fortunately the process is one of extreme simplicity. Take a glass of
water, apply gentle heat underneath, and the water begins to evaporate.
What does this mean? It means that the water is being broken up into
its separate ultimate grains or molecules. If the glass of water could be
placed on a sufficiently sensitive spring balance, we should see that the
process of evaporation does not proceed continuously, layer after layer,
but jerkily, moleciile by molecule. We should find the weight of the
water changing by jumps, each jump representing the weight of a single
molecule. The glass may contain any integral number of molecules but
never fractional numbers — if fractions of a molecule exist, at any rate
they do not come into play in the evaporation of a glass of water.

THE GASEOUS STATE. The molecules which break loose from the surface
of the water as it evaporates form a gas — water-vapour or steam. A gas
consists of a vast number of molecules which fly about entirely independ-
ently of one another, except at the rare instants at which two collide,
and so interfere with each other's motion. The extent to which the mole-
cules interfere with one another must obviously depend on their sizes;

EXPLORING THE ATOM 177

the larger they are, the more frequent their collisions will be, and the
more they will interfere with one another's motion. Actually the extent
of this interference provides the best means of estimating the sizes of
molecules. They prove to be exceedingly small, being for the most part
about a hundred-millionth of an inch in diameter, and, as a general rule,
the simpler molecules have the smaller diameters, as we might perhaps
have anticipated. The molecule of water has a diameter of 1.8 hundred-
millionths of an inch (4.6 X io~8 cm.), while that of the simpler hydro-
gen molecule is only just over a hundred-millionth of an inch (2.7 X
io"8 cm.). The fact that a number of different lines of investigation all
assign the same diameters to these molecules provides an excellent proof
of the reality of their existence.

As molecules are so exceedingly small, they must also be exceedingly
numerous. A pint of water contains 1.89 X io25 molecules, each weighing
i. 06 X io~24 ounce. If these molecules were placed end to end, they
would form a chain capable of encircling the earth over 200 million times.
If they were scattered over the whole land surface of the earth, there
would be nearly 100 million molecules to every square inch of land. If
we think of the molecules as tiny seeds, the total amount of seed needed
to sow the whole earth at the rate of 100 million molecules to the square
inch could be put into a pint pot.

These molecules move with very high speeds; the molecules which
constitute the ordinary air of an ordinary room move with an average
speed of about 500 yards a second. This is roughly the speed of a rifle-
bullet, and is rather more than the ordinary speed of sound. As we are
familiar with this latter speed from everyday experience, it is easy to form
some conception of molecular speeds in a gas. It is not a mere accident
that molecular speeds are comparable with the speed of sound. Sound
is a disturbance which one molecule passes on to another when it collides
with it, rather like relays of messengers passing a message on to one
another, or Greek torch-bearers handing on their lights. Between collisions
the message is carried forward at exactly the speed at which the molecules
travel. If these all travelled with precisely the same speed and in precisely
the same direction, the sound would of course travel with just the speed
of the molecules. But many of them travel on oblique courses, so that
although the average speed of individual molecules in ordinary air is
about 500 yards a second, the net forward velocity of the sound is only
about 370 yards a second.

At high temperatures the molecules may have even greater speeds; the
molecules of steam in a boiler may move at 1000 yards a second.

It is the high speed of molecular motion that is responsible for the

178 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

great pressure exerted by a gas; any surface in contact with ordinary air
is exposed to a hail of molecules each moving with the speed of a rifle-
bullet. With each breath we take, swarms of millions of millions of
millions of molecules enter our bodies, each moving at about 500 yards a
second, and nothing but their incessant hammering on the walls of our
lungs keeps our chests from collapsing. To take another instance, the
piston in a locomotive cylinder is bombarded by about 14 X io28 mole-
cules every second, each moving at about 800 yards a second. This inces-
sant fusillade of innumerable tiny bullets urges the piston forward in the
cylinder, and so propels the train. . . .

ATOMS

In the gaseous state, each separate molecule retains all the chemical
properties of the solid or liquid substance from which it originated;
molecules of steam, for instance, moisten salt or sugar, or combine with
thirsty substances such as unslaked lime or potassium chloride, just as
water does.

Is it possible to break up the molecules still further? Lucretius and his
predecessors would, of course, have said: "No." A simple experiment,
which, however, was quite beyond their range, will speedily shew that
they were wrong.

On sliding the two wires of an ordinary electric bell circuit into a
tumbler of water, down opposite sides, bubbles of gas will be found to
collect on the wires, and chemical examination shews that the two lots of
gas have entirely different properties. They cannot, then, both be water-
vapour, and in point of fact neither of them is; one proves to be hydrogen
and the other oxygen. There is found to be twice as much hydrogen as
oxygen, whence we conclude that the electric current has broken up each
molecule of water into two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen. These
smaller units into which a molecule is broken are called "atoms." Each
molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen (H) and one atom
of oxygen (O) ; this is expressed in its chemical formula HbO.

All the innumerable substances which occur on earth — shoes, ships,
sealing-wax, cabbages, kings, carpenters, walruses, oysters, everything we
can think of — can be analysed into their constituent atoms, either in this
or in other ways. It might be thought that a quite incredible number of
different kinds of atoms would emerge from the rich variety of sub-
stances we find on earth. Actually the number is quite small. The same
atoms turn up again and again, and the great variety of substances we
find on earth results, not from any great variety of atoms entering into
their composition, but from the great variety of ways in which a few

EXPLORING THE ATOM 179

types of atoms can be combined — just as in a colour-print three colours
can be combined so as to form almost all the colours we meet in nature,
not to mention other weird hues such as never were on land or sea.

Analysis of all known terrestrial substances has, so far, revealed only
90 different kinds of atoms. Probably 92 exist, there being reasons for
thinking that two, or possibly even more, still remain to be discovered.
Even of the 90 already known, the majority are exceedingly rare, most
common substances being formed out of the combinations of about 14
different atoms, say hydrogen (H), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), oxygen
(O), sodium (Na), magnesium (Mg), aluminum (Al), silicon (Si),
phosphorus (P), sulphur (S), chlorine (Cl), potassium (K), calcium
(Ca), and iron (Fe).

In this way, the whole earth, with its endless diversity of substances, is
found to be a building built of standard bricks — the atoms. And of these
only a few types, about 14, occur at all abundantly in the structure, the
others appearing but rarely.

SPECTROSCOPY. Just as a bell struck with a hammer emits a char-
acteristic note, so every atom put in a flame or in an electric arc or discharge-
tube, emits a characteristic light, which the spectroscope will resolve into
its separate constituents.

The spectrum of sunlight discloses the chemical composition of the
solar atmosphere, and here again we still find the same types of atoms
as on earth, and no others. With a few quite unimportant exceptions,
every line in the sun's spectrum can be identified as originating from
some type of atom already known on earth. Of the fifteen metals which
are believed to be commonest in the sun's atmosphere, seven, which
account for no less than 96 per cent, of the whole, figure in our list of the
fourteen elements which are commonest on earth. Actually they are
precisely the seven principal constituents of terrestrial rocks, although
their relative proportions are different on the sun and earth.

Thus, broadly speaking the same atoms occur in the sun's atmosphere
as on earth, and the same is true of the atmospheres of the stars. It is
tempting to jump to the generalisation that the whole universe is built
solely of the 90 or 92 types of atoms found on earth, but at present there
is no justification for this. The light we receive from the sun and stars
comes only from the outermost layers of their surfaces, and so conveys no
information at all as to the types of atoms to be found in the stars'
interiors. Indeed we have no knowledge of the types of atoms which
occur in the interior of our own earth.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ATOM. Until quite recently, atoms were
regarded as the permanent bricks of which the whole universe was built.

180 MATTER, ENERGY, .PHYSICAL LAW

All the changes of the universe were supposed to amount to nothing
more drastic than a re-arrangement of permanent indestructible atoms;
like a child's box of bricks, these built many buildings in turn. The story
of twentieth-century physics is primarily the story of the shattering of
this concept.

It was towards the end of the last century that Crookes, Lenard, and
above all, Sir J. J. Thomson first began to break up the atom. The struc-
tures which had been deemed the unbreakable bricks of the universe for
more than 2000 years, were suddenly shown to be very susceptible to
having fragments chipped off. A mile-stone was reached in 1897, when
Thomson shewed that these fragments were identical no matter what
type of atom they came from; they were of equal weight and they carried
equal charges of negative electricity. On account of this last property they
were called "electrons." The atom cannot, however, be built up of elec-
trons and nothing else, for as each electron carries a negative charge of
electricity, a structure which consisted of nothing but electrons would also
carry a negative charge. Two negative charges of electricity repel one
another, as also do two positive charges, while two charges, one of positive
and one of negative electricity, attract one another. This makes it easy
to determine whether any body or structure carries a positive or a negative
charge of electricity, or no charge at all. Observation shews that a com-
plete atom carries no charge at all, so that somewhere in the atom there
must be a positive charge of electricity, of amount just sufficient to
neutralise the combined negative charges of all the electrons.

In 1911 experiments by Sir Ernest Rutherford and others revealed the
architecture of the atom, in its main lines at least. As we shall soon see,
nature herself provides an endless supply of small particles charged with
positive electricity, and moving with very high speeds, in the a-particles
shot off from radio-active substances. Rutherford's method was in brief
to fire these into atoms and observe the result. And the surprising result
he obtained was that the vast majority of these bullets passed straight
through the atom as though it simply did not exist. It was like shooting
at a ghost.

Yet the atom was not all ghostly. A tiny fraction — perhaps one in
10,000 — of the bullets were deflected from their courses as if they had met
something very substantial indeed. A mathematical calculation shewed
that these obstacles could only be the missing positive charges of the
atoms.

A detailed study of the paths of these projectiles proved that the whole
positive charge of an atom must be concentrated in a single very small
space, having dimensions of the order of only a millionth of a millionth of

EXPLORING THE ATOM 181

an inch. In this way, Rutherford was led to propound the view of atomic
structure which is generally associated with his name. He supposed the
chemical properties and nature of the atom to reside in a weighty, but
excessively minute, central "nucleus" carrying a positive charge of elec-
tricity, around which a number of negatively charged electrons described
orbits. He had to suppose that the electrons were in motion in the atom,
otherwise the attraction of positive for negative electricity would immedi-
ately draw them into the central nucleus — just as gravitational attraction
would cause the earth to fall into the sun, were it not for the earth's
orbital motion. In brief, Rutherford supposed the atom to be constructed
like the solar system, the heavy central nucleus playing the part of the
sun and the electrons acting the parts of the planets.

The modern theory of wave-mechanics casts doubt on some at least
of these concepts — perhaps on all, although this is still in doubt. Thus it
may prove necessary ro discard many or all of them before long. Yet
Rutherford's concepts provide a simple and easily visualised picture of
the atom, whereas the theory of wave-mechanics has not yet been able
to provide a picture at all. For this reason we shall continue to describe
the atom in terms of Rutherford's picture.

According to this picture, the electrons are supposed to move round
the nucleus with just the speeds necessary to save them from being
drawn into it, and these speeds prove to be terrific, the average electron
revolving around its nucleus several thousand million million times every
second, with a speed of hundreds of miles a second. Thus the smallness
of their orbits does not prevent the electrons moving with higher orbital
speeds than the planets, or even the stars themselves.

By clearing a space around the central nucleus, and so preventing other
atoms from coming too near to it, these electronic orbits give size to the
atom. The volume of space kept clear by the electrons is enormously
greater than the total volume of the electrons; roughly, the ratio of
volumes is that of the battlefield to the bullets. The atom has about
100,000 times the diameter, and so about a thousand million million times
the volume, of a single electron. The nucleus, although it generally weighs
3000 or 4000 times as much as all the electrons in the atom together, is at
most comparable in size with, and may be even smaller than, a single
electron.

We know the extreme emptiness of astronomical space. Choose a point
in space at random, and the odds against its being occupied by a star are
enormous. Even the solar system consists overwhelmingly of empty space;
choose a spot inside the solar system at random, and there are still
immense odds against its being occupied by a planet or even by a comet,

182 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

meteorite or smaller body. And now we see that this emptiness extends
also to the space of physics. Even inside the atom we choose a point at
random, and the odds against there being anything there are immense;
they are of the order of at least millions of millions to one. Six specks
of dust inside Waterloo Station represent — or rather over-represent — the
extent to which space is crowded with stars. In the same way a few
wasps — six for the atom of carbon — flying around in Waterloo Station
will represent the extent to which the atom is crowded with electrons —
all the rest is emptiness. As we pass the whole structure of the universe
under review, from the giant nebulae and the vast interstellar and inter-
nebular spaces down to the tiny structure of the atom, little but vacant
space passes before our mental gaze. We live in a gossamer universe;
pattern, plan and design are there in abundance, but solid substance is
rare.

ATOMIC NUMBERS. The number of elecrons which fly round in orbits
in an atom is called the "atomic number" of the atom. Atoms of all
atomic numbers from i to 92 have been found, except for two missing
numbers 85 and 87. As already mentioned, it is highly probable that these
also exist, and that there are 92 "elements" whose atomic numbers occupy
the whole range of atomic numbers from i to 92 continuously.

The atom of atomic number unity is of course the simplest of all. It is
the hydrogen atom, in which a solitary electron revolves around a nucleus
whose charge of positive electricity is exactly equal in amount, although
opposite in sign, to the charge on the negative electron.

Next comes the helium atom of atomic number 2, in which two elec-
trons revolve about a nucleus which has four times the weight of the
hydrogen nucleus although carrying only twice its electric charge. After
this comes the lithium atom of atomic number 3, in which three electrons
revolve around a nucleus having six times the weight of the hydrogen
atom and three times its charge. And so it goes on, until we reach ura-
nium, the heaviest of all atoms known on earth, which has 92 electrons
describing orbits about a nucleus of 238 times the weight of the hydrogen
nucleus.

RADIO-ACTIVITY

While physical science was still engaged in breaking up the atom into
its component factors, it made the further discovery that the nuclei them-
selves were neither permanent nor indestructible. In 1896 Becquerel had
found that various substances containing uranium possessed the remark-
able property, as it then appeared, of spontaneously affecting photographic
plates in their vicinity. This observation led to the discoverv of a new

EXPLORING THE ATOM 183

property of matter, namely radio-activity. All the results obtained from
the study of radio-activity in the few following years were co-ordinated
in the hypothesis of "spontaneous disintegration" which Rutherford and
Soddy advanced in 1903. According to this hypothesis in its present form,
radio-activity indicates a spontaneous break-up of the nuclei of the atoms
of radio-active substances. These atoms are so far from being permanent
and indestructible that their very nuclei crumble away with the mere
lapse of time, so that what was once the nucleus of a uranium atom is
transformed, after sufficient time, into the nucleus of a lead atom.

The process of transformation is not instantaneous; it proceeds grad-
ually and by distinct stages. During its progress, three types of product are
emitted, which are designated a-rays, (3-rays, and y-rays.

These were originally described indiscriminately as rays because all
three were found to have the power of penetrating through a certain
thickness of air, metal, or other substance. It was not until later that their
true nature was discovered. It is well known that magnetic forces, such
as, for instance, occur in the space between the poles of a magnet, cause
a moving particle charged with electricity to deviate from a straight
course; the particle deviates in one direction or the other according as
it is charged with positive or negative electricity. On passing the various
rays emitted by radio-active substances through the space between the
poles of a powerful magnet, the a-rays were found to consist of particles
charged with positive electricity, and the P-rays to consist of particles
charged with negative electricity. But the most powerful magnetic forces
which could be employed failed to cause the slightest deviation in the
paths of the y-rays, from which it was concluded that either the y-rays
were not material particles at all, or that, if they were, they carried no
electric charges. The former of these alternatives was subsequently proved
to be the true one.

a-p ARTICLES. The positively charged particles which constitute a-rays
are generally described as a-particles. In 1909 Rutherford and Royds
allowed a-particles to penetrate through a thin glass wall of less than a
hundredth of a millimetre in thickness into a chamber from which they
could not escape — a sort of mouse-trap for a-particles. After the process
had continued for a long time, the final result was not an accumulation
of a-particles but an accumulation of the gas helium, the next simplest
gas after hydrogen. In this way it was established that the positively
charged a-particles are simply nuclei of helium atoms; the a-particles,
being positively charged, had attracted negatively charged electrons to
themselves out of the walls of the chamber and the result was a collection
of complete helium atoms.

184 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

The a-particles move with enormous speeds, which depend upon the
nature of the radio-active substance from which they have been shot out.
The fastest particles of all move with a speed of 12,800 miles a second;
even the slowest have a speed of 8800 miles a second, which is about
30,000 times the ordinary molecular velocity in air. Particles moving with
such speeds as these knock all ordinary molecules out of their way; this
explains the great penetrating power of the a-rays.

(3-p ARTICLES. By examining the extent to which their motion was
influenced by magnetic forces, the P-rays were found to consist of nega-
tively charged electrons, exactly similar to those which surround the
nucleus in all atoms. As an a-particle carries a positive charge equal in
amount to that of two electrons, an atom which has ejected an a-particle
is left with a deficiency of positive charge, or what comes to the same
thing, with a negative charge, equal to that of two electrons. Consequently
it is natural, and indeed almost inevitable, that the ejections of a-particles
should alternate with an ejection of negatively charged electrons, in the
proportion of one a-particle to two electrons, so that the balance of posi-
tive and negative electricity in the atom may be maintained. The (3-parti-
cles move with even greater speeds than the a-particles, many approaching
to within a few per cent, of the velocity of light (186,000 miles a
second). . . .

Y-RAYS. As has already been mentioned, the y-rays are not material
particles at all; they prove to be merely radiation of a very special kind.

Thus the break-up of a radio-active atom may be compared to the
discharge of a gun; the a-particle is the shot fired, the ^-particles are the
smoke, and the y-rays are the flash. The atom of lead which finally
remains is the unloaded gun, and the original radio-active atom, of
uranium or what not, was the loaded gun. And the special peculiarity of
radio-active guns is that they go of? spontaneously and of their own
accord. All attempts to pull the trigger have so far failed, or at least have
led to inconclusive results; we can only wait, and the gun will be found
to fire itself in time. . . .

In 1920, Rutherford, using radio-active atoms as guns, fired a-particles
at light atoms and found that direct hits broke up their nuclei. There is,
however, found to be a significant difference between the spontaneous
disintegration of the heavy radio-active atoms and the artificial disintegra-
tion of the light atoms; in the former case, apart from the ever-present
P-rays and y-rays, only a-particles are ejected, while in the latter case
a-particles were not ejected at all, but particles of only about a quarter
their weight, which proved to be identical with the nuclei of hydrogen
atoms. . . .

EXPLORING THE ATOM 185

ISOTOPES. Two atoms have the same chemical properties if the charges
of positive electricity carried by their nuclei are the same. The amount of
this charge fixes the number of electrons which can revolve around the
nucleus, this number being of course exactly that needed to neutralise
the electric field of the nucleus, and this in turn fixes the atomic number
of the element. And it has for long been known that the weights of all
atoms are, to a very close approximation, multiples of a single definite
weight. This unit weight is approximately equal to the weight of the
hydrogen atom, but is more nearly equal to a sixteenth of the weight
of the oxygen atom. The weight of any type of atom, measured in terms
of this unit, is called the "atomic weight" of the atom.

It used to be thought that a mass of any single chemical element, such
as mercury or xenon, consisted of entirely similar atoms, every one o£
which had not only the same atomic number but also the same atomic
weight. But Dr. Aston has shewn very convincingly that atoms of the
same chemical element, say neon or chlorine, may have nuclei of a great
many different weights. The various forms which the atoms of the same
chemical element can assume are known as isotopes being of course
distinguished by their different weights.

These weights are much nearer to whole numbers than were the old
"atomic" weights of the chemists. For instance the atomic weight of
chlorine used to be given as 35-5, and this was taken to mean that chlorine
consisted of a mixture of atoms each 35-5 times as massive as the hydrogen
atom. Aston finds that chlorine consists of a mixture of atoms of atomic
weights 35 and 37 (or more accurately 34-983 and 36-980), the former being
approximately three times as plentiful as the latter. In the same way a
mass of mercury, of which the mean atomic weight is about 200-6, is
found to be a mixture of seven kinds of atoms of atomic weights 196, 198,
199, 200, 201, 202, 204. Tin is a mixture of no fewer than eleven isotopes —
112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124.

PROTONS AND ELECTRONS. When the presence of isotopes is taken into
account, the atomic weights of all atoms prove to be far nearer to integral
numbers than had originally been thought. This, in conjunction with
Rutherford's artificial disintegration of atomic nuclei, led to the general
acceptance of the hypothesis that the whole universe is built up of only
two kinds of ultimate bricks, namely, electrons and protons. Each proton
carries a positive charge of electricity exactly equal in amount to the
negative charge carried by an electron, but has about 1847 times the weight
of the electron. Protons are supposed to be identical with the nucleus
of the hydrogen atom, all other nuclei being composite structures in which
both protons and electrons are closely packed together. For instance, the

186 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

nucleus of the helium atom, the a-particle, consists of four protons and
two electrons, these giving it approximately four times the weight of the
hydrogen atom, and a resultant charge equal to twice that of the nucleus
of the hydrogen atom.

NEUTRONS. Until quite recently this hypothesis was believed to give
a satisfactory and complete account of the structure of matter. Then in
1931 two German physicists, Bothe and Becker, bombarding the light
elements beryllium and boron with the very rapid a-particles emitted by
polonium, obtained a new and very penetrating radiation which they
were at first inclined to interpret as a kind of y-radiation. Subsequently
Dr. Chad wick of Cambridge shewed that it possessed properties which
were inconstant with this interpretation and made it clear that the radia-
tion consists of material objects of a type hitherto unknown to science.
To the greatest accuracy of which the experiments permit these objects
are found to have the same mass as the hydrogen atom, while their very
high penetrating power shews that if they have any electric charge at all,
it can only be a minute fraction at most of the charge of the electron.

Thus it seems likely that the radiation consists of uncharged particles
of the same mass as the proton — something quite new in a world which
until recently was believed to consist entirely of charged particles. Chad-
wick describes these new particles as "neutrons." Whether they are
themselves fundamental constituents of matter or not remains to be seen.
Chadwick has suggested that they may be composite structures, each
consisting of a proton and electron in such close combination that they
penetrate matter almost as freely as though they had no size at all. On the
other hand Heisenberg has considered the possibility that the neutron
may be fundamental, the nucleus of an atom being built up solely of
positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, while the negative
electrons are confined to the regions outside the nucleus. On this view
there are just as many protons in the nucleus as there are electrons outside
the nucleus, the number of each being the atomic number of the element,
while the excess of mass needed to make up the atomic weight is provided
by the inclusion of the requisite number of neutrons in the nucleus.
Isotopes of the same element differ of course merely in having different
numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.

Rutherford and other physicists have considered the further possibility
that other kinds of neutrons, with double the mass of the hydrogen atom,
may also occur in atomic nuclei, a hypothesis for which there seems to
be considerable observational support.

POSITIVE ELECTRONS. Even more revolutionary discoveries were to
come. A few years ago it seemed a piece of extraordinary good luck that
in the a-particles nature herself had provided projectiles of sufficient

EXPLORING THE ATOM 187

shattering power to smash up the nucleus of the atom and disclose its
secrets to the observation of the physicist. More recently nature has been
found to provide yet more shattering projectiles in the cosmic radiation
which continually bombards the surface of the earth — probably from
outer space. This radiation has such a devastating effect on the atomic
nuclei that it is difficult to make much of the resulting collection of frag-
ments. It is, however, always possible to examine any debris, no matter
how involved, by noticing how the constituent particles move when acted
on by magnetic forces.

In 1932 C. D. Anderson made observations which suggested that this
debris contained, among other ingredients, particles having the same
positive charge as the proton, but a mass only comparable with, and pos-
sibly equal to, that of the electron. The existence of such particles has been
confirmed by Blackett and Occhialini at Cambridge. The new particles
may well be described as positively charged electrons, and so have been
named "positrons."

As these new particles are believed to emerge from atomic nuclei, it
would seem plausible to suppose that they must be normal constituents
of the nuclei. Yet the recent discovery of the neutron suggests other pos-
sibilities.

We have already mentioned the hypothesis, advocated by Heisenberg
and others, that the nucleus consists solely of neutrons and protons. Ander-
son has suggested that the proton may not be a fundamental unit in the
structure of matter, but may consist of a positron and a neutron in com-
bination. Every nucleus would then contain only neutrons and positrons,
and the positrons could be driven out by bombardment in the ordinary
way.

The objection to this view is that the debris of the nuclei shattered by
cosmic radiation is found to contain electrons as well as positrons, the
electrons emerging, so far as can be seen, from the same atomic nuclei as
the positrons. This has led Blackett and Occhialini to propound the
alternative hypothesis that the electrons and positrons are born in pairs as
the result of the processes of bombardment and disintegration of atomic
nuclei. At first this may seem a flagrant violation of all our views as to the
permanence of matter, but we shall see shortly that it is entirely in accord
with the present trend of physics.

It seems fairly certain that the positron has at most but a temporary
existence. For positrons do not appear to be associated with matter under
normal conditions, although they ought to abound if they were being
continually produced out of nuclei at anything like the rate which the
observations of Blackett and Occhialini seem to indicate. They might of

188 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

course rapidly disappear from view through entering into combination
with negatively charged particles to form some sort of permanent stable
structure, but it seems more probable, as Blackett and Occhialini them-
selves suggest, that they disappear from existence altogether by combining
with negative electrons. Just as a pair of electrons — one positively charged
and one negatively charged — can be born out of nothing but energy, so
they can die in one another's arms and leave nothing but energy behind.
We shall discuss the underlying physical mechanism almost immediately.
Before the existence of the positron had been observed, or even suspected
experimentally, Professor Dirac of Cambridge had propounded a mathe-
matical theory which predicted not only the existence of the positron, but
also the way in which it ought to behave. Dirac's theory is too abstrusely
mathematical to be explained here, but it predicts that a shower of posi-
trons ought gradually to fade away by spontaneous combination with
negative electrons, following the same law of decay as radio-active sub-
stances. And the average life of a positron is predicted to be one of only
a few millionths of a second, which amply explains why the positron can
live long enough to be photographed in a condensation chamber, but not
long enough to shew its presence elsewhere in the universe.

RADIATION

We have so far discussed only the material constituents of matter: we
have pictured the atom as being built up of some or all of the material
ingredients which we have described as electrons, protons, neutrons and
positrons. Yet this is not the whole story. If it were, every atom would
consist of a certain number of protons and neutrons with just sufficient
electrons and positrons to make the total electric charge equal to zero.
Thus, apart from the insignificant weights of electrons and positrons, the
weight of every atom would be an exact multiple of the weight of a
hydrogen atom. Experiment shews this not to be the case.

ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY. To get at the whole truth, we have to
recognise that, in addition to containing material electrons and protons>
with possible neutrons and positrons, the atom contains yet a further
ingredient which we may describe as electromagnetic energy. We may
think of this, although with something short of absolute scientific accuracy,
as bottled radiation.

If we disturb the surface of a pond with a stick, a series of ripples starts
from the stick and travels, in a series of ever-expanding circles, over the
surface of the pond. As the water resists the motion of the stick, we have
to work to keep the pond in a state of agitation. The energy of this work
is transformed, in part at least, into the energy of the ripples. We ca,n see

EXPLORING THE ATOM 189

that the ripples carry energy about with them, because they cause a floating
cork or a toy boat to rise up against the earth's gravitational pull. Thus
the ripples provide a mechanism for distributing over the surface of the
pond the energy that we put into the pond through the medium of the
moving stick.

Light and all other forms of radiation are analogous to water ripples or
waves, in that they distribute energy from a central source. The sun's
radiation distributes through space the vast amount of energy which is
generated inside the sun. We hardly know whether there is any actual
wave motion in light or not, but we know that both light and all other
types of radiation are propagated in such a form that they have many of
the properties of a succession of waves.

The different colours of light which in combination constitute sunlight
can be separated out by passing the light through a prism, thus forming
a rainbow or "spectrum" of colors. The separation can also be effected by
an alternative instrument, the diffraction grating, which consists merely
of a metal mirror with a large number of parallel lines scratched evenly
across its surface. The theory of the action of this latter instrument is
well understood; it shews that actually the light is separated into waves
of different wave-lengths. (The wave-length in a system of ripples is the
distance from the crest of one ripple to that of the next, and the term may
be applied to all phenomena of an undulatory nature.) This proves that
different colours of light are produced by waves of different lengths, and
at the same time enables us to measure the lengths of the waves which
correspond to the different colours of light.

These prove to be very minute. The reddest light we can see, which is

•2

that of longest wave-length, has a wave-length of only — inch

100,000

(7.5 Xio"5 cm.); the most violet light we can see has a wave-length only
half of this, or 0-000015 inch. Light of all colours travels with the same
uniform speed of 186,000 miles, or 3Xio10 centimetres, a second. The
number of waves of red light which pass any fixed point in a second is
accordingly no fewer than four hundred million million. This is called
the "frequency" of the light. Violet light has the still higher frequency
of eight hundred million million; when we see violet light, eight hundred
million million waves of light enter our eyes each second.

The spectrum of analysed sunlight appears to the eye to stretch from
red light at one end to violet light at the other, but these are not its true
limits. When certain chemical salts are placed beyond the violet end of
the visible spectrum, they are found to shine vividly, shewing that even
out here energy is being transported, although in invisible form. And

190 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

other methods make it clear that the same is true out beyond the red end
of the spectrum. A thermometer, or other heat-measuring instrument,
placed here will shew that energy is being received here in the form of
heat.

In this way we find that regions of invisible radiation stretch indefi-
nitely from both ends of the visible spectrum. From one end — the red —
we can pass continuously to waves of the type used for wireless transmis-
sion, which have wave-lengths of the order of hundreds, or even thousands,
of yards. From the violet end, we pass through waves of shorter and ever
shorter wave-length — all the various forms of ultra-violet radiation. At
wave-lengths of from about a hundredth to a thousandth of the wave-
length of visible light, we come to the familiar X-rays, which penetrate
through inches of our flesh, so that we can photograph the bones inside.
Far out even beyond these, we come to the type of radiation which con-
stitutes the Y-rays, its wave-length being of the order of

10,000,000,000

inch, or only about a hundred-thousandth part of the wave-length of
visible light. Thus the y-rays may be regarded as invisible radiation of
extremely short wave-length. We shall discuss the exact function they
serve later. For the moment let us merely remark that in the first instance
they served the extremely useful function of fogging BecquereFs photo-
graphic plates, thus leading to the detection of the radio-active property
of matter.

It is a commonplace of modern electromagnetic theory that energy of
every kind carries weight about with it, weight which is in every sense as
real as the weight of a ton of coal. A ray of light causes an impact on any
surface on which it falls, just as a jet of water does, or a blast of wind, or
the fall of a ton of coal; with a sufficiently strong light one could knock a
man down just as surely as with the jet of water from a fire hose. This is
not a mere theoretical speculation. The pressure of light on a surface has
been both detected and measured by direct experiment. The experiments
are extraordinarily difficult because, judged by all ordinary standards, the
weight carried by radiation is exceedingly small; all the radiation emitted
from a 50 horse-power searchlight working continuously for a century
weighs only about a twentieth of an ounce.

It follows that any substance which is emitting radiation must at the
same time be losing weight. In particular, the disintegration of any radio-
active substance must involve a decrease of weight, since it is accompanied
by the emission of radiation in the form of Y-rays. The ultimate fate of an
ounce of uranium may be expressed by the equation:

EXPLORING THE ATOM 191

f 0-8653 °unce lead,

i ounce uranium =«| 0-1345 " helium,
[0-0002 " radiation.

The lead and helium together contain just as many electrons and just
as many protons as did the original ounce of uranium, but their combined
weight is short of the weight of the original uranium by about one part
in 4000. Where 4000 ounces of matter originally existed, only 3999 now
remain; the missing ounce has gone off in the form of radiation.

This makes it clear that we must not expect the weights of the various
atoms to be exact multiples of the weight of the hydrogen atom; any
such expectation would ignore the weight of the bottled-up electro-mag-
netic energy which is capable of being set free and going off into space in
the form of radiation as the atom changes its make-up. The weight of this
energy is relatively small, so that the weights of the atoms must be ex-
pected to be approximately, although not exactly, integral multiples of
that of the hydrogen atom, and this expectation is confirmed. The exact
weight of our atomic building is not simply the total weight of all its
bricks; something must be added for the weight of the mortar— the electro-
magnetic energy — which keeps the bricks bound together.

Thus the normal atom consists of its material constituents — protons,
electrons, neutrons and positrons, or some at least of these — and also of
energy, which also contributes something to its weight. When the atom
re-arranges itself, either spontaneously or under bombardment, protons
and electrons, or other fragments of its material structure, may be shot off
in the form of a- and (3-particles, and energy may also be set free in the
form of radiation. This radiation may either take the form of y-rays, or
of other forms of visible and invisible radiation. The final weight of the
atom will be obtained by deducting from its original weight not only
the weight of all the ejected electrons and protons, but also the weight
of all the energy which has been set free as radiation.

QUANTUM THEORY

The series of concepts which we now approach are difficult to grasp
and still more difficult to explain, largely, no doubt, because our minds
receive no assistance from our everyday experience of nature. It becomes
necessary to speak mainly in terms of analogies, parables and models which
can make no claim to represent ultimate reality; indeed, it is rash to
hazard a guess even as to the direction in which ultimate reality lies.

The laws of electricity which were in vogue up to about the end of the
nineteenth century— the famous laws of Maxwell and Faraday— required

192 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

that the energy of an atom should continually decrease, through the atom
scattering energy abroad in the form of radiation, and so having less and
less left for itself. These same laws predicted that all energy set free in
space should rapidly transform itself into radiation of almost infinitesimal
wave-length. Yet these things simply did not happen, making it obvious
that the then prevailing electrodynamical laws had to be given up.

CAVITY-RADIATION. A crucial case of failure was provided by what is
known as "cavity-radiation." A body with a cavity in its interior is heated
up to incandescence; no notice is taken of the light and heat emitted by
its outer surface, but the light imprisoned in the internal cavity is let out
through a small window and analysed into its constituent colours by a
spectroscope or diffraction grating. This is the radiation that is known
as "cavity-radiation." It represents the most complete form of radiation
possible, radiation from which no colour is missing, and in which every
colour figures at its full strength. No known substance ever emits quite
such complete radiation from its surface, although many approximate to
doing so. We speak of such bodies as "full radiators."

The nineteenth-century laws of electromagnetism predicted that the
whole of the radiation emitted by a full radiator or from a cavity ought
to be found at or beyond the extreme violet end of the spectrum, inde-
pendently of the precise temperature to which the body had been heated.
In actual fact the radiation is usually found piled up at exactly the op-
posite end of the spectrum, and in no case does it ever conform to the
predictions of the nineteenth century laws, or even begin to think of
doing so.

In the year 1900 Professor Planck of Berlin discovered experimentally
the law by which cavity-radiation is distributed among the different
colours of the spectrum. He further shewed how his newly-discovered law
could be deduced theoretically from a system of electromagnetic laws
which differed very sensationally from those then in vogue.

Planck imagined all kinds of radiation to be emitted by systems of
vibrators which emitted light when excited, much as tuning forks emit
sound when they are struck. The old electrodynamical laws predicted
that each vibration should gradually come to rest and then stop, as the
vibrations of a tuning fork do, until the vibrator was in some way excited
again. Rejecting all this, Planck supposed that a vibrator could change
its energy by sudden jerks, and in no other way; it might have one, two,
three, four or any other integral number of units of energy, but no inter-
mediate fractional numbers, so that gradual changes of energy were
rendered impossible. The vibrator, so to speak, kept no small change,
and could only pay out its energy a shilling at a time until it had none

EXPLORING THE ATOM 193

left. Not only so, but it refused to receive small change, although it was
prepared to accept complete shillings. This concept, sensational, revolu-
tionary and even ridiculous, as many thought it at the time, was found to
lead exactly to the distribution of colours actually observed in cavity-ra-
diation.

In 1917 Einstein put the concept into the more precise form which now
prevails. According to a theory previously advanced by Professor Niels
Bohr of Copenhagen, an atomic or molecular structure does not change
its configuration, or dissipate away its energy, by gradual stages; on the
contrary, the changes are so abrupt that it is almost permissible to regard
them as a series of sudden jumps or jerks. Bohr supposed that an atomic
structure has a number of possible states or configurations which are
entirely distinct and detached one from another, just as a weight placed
on a staircase has only a possible number of positions; it may be 3 stairs
up, or 4 or 5, but cannot be 3 % or 3% stairs up. The change from one
position to another is generally effected through the medium of radiation.
The system can be pushed upstairs by absorbing energy from radiation
which falls on it, or may move downstairs to a state of lower energy and
emit energy in the form of radiation in so doing. Only radiation of a
certain definite colour, and so of a certain precise wave-length, is of any
account for effecting a particular change of state. The problem of shifting
an atomic system is like that of extracting a box of matches from a penny-
in-the-slot machine; it can only be done by a special implement, to wit a
penny, which must be of precisely the right size and weight — a coin which
is either too small or too large, too light or too heavy, is doomed to fail.
If we pour radiation of the wrong wave length on to an atom, we may re-
produce the comedy of the millionaire whose total wealth will not procure
him a box of matches because he has not a loose penny, or we may re*
produce the tragedy of the child who cannot obtain a slab of chocolate
because its hoarded wealth consists of farthings and half-pence, but we
shall not disturb the atom. When mixed radiation is poured on to a col-
lection of atoms, these absorb the radiation of just those wave-lengths
which are needed to change their internal states, and none other; radiation
of all other wave-lengths passes by unaffected.

This selective action of the atom on radiation is put in evidence in a
variety of ways; it is perhaps most simply shewn in the spectra of the sun
and stars. Dark lines similar to those which Fraunhofer observed in the
solar spectrum are observed in the spectra of practically all stars and we
can now understand why this must be. Light of every possible wave-length
streams out from the hot interior of a star, and bombards the atoms which
form its atmosphere. Each atom drinks up that radiation which is of

194 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

precisely the right wave-length for it, but has no interaction of any kind
with the rest, so that the radiation which is finally emitted from the star
is deficient in just the particular wave-lengths which suit the atoms. Thus
the star shews an absorption spectrum of fine lines. The positions of these
lines in the spectrum shew what types of radiation the stellar atoms have
swallowed, and so enable us to identify the atoms from our laboratory
knowledge of the tastes of different kinds of atoms for radiation. But
what ultimately decides which types of radiation an atom will swallow,
and which it will reject?

It had been part of Planck's theory that radiation of each wave-length
has associated with it a certain amount of energy, called the "quantum,"
which depends on the wave-length and on nothing else. The quantum
is supposed to be proportional to the "frequency," or number of vibrations
of the radiation per second, and so is inversely proportional to the wave-
length of the radiation — the shorter the wave-length, the greater the
energy of the quantum, and conversely. Red light has feeble quanta, violet
light has energetic quanta, and so on.

Einstein now supposed that radiation of a given type could effect an
atomic or molecular change, only if the energy needed for the change
is precisely equal to that of a single quantum of the radiation. This is
commonly known as Einstein's law; it determines the precise type of
radiation needed to work any atomic or molecular penny-in-the-slot
mechanism.

We notice that work which demands one powerful quantum cannot
be performed by two, or indeed by any number whatever, of feeble quanta.
A small amount of violet (high-frequency) light can accomplish what no
amount of red (low-frequency) light can effect.

The law prohibits the killing of two birds with one stone, as well as
the killing of one bird with two stones; the whole quantum is used up in
effecting the change, so that no energy from this particular quantum is
left over to contribute to any further change. This aspect of the matter is
illustrated by Einstein's photochemical law: "in any chemical reaction
which is produced by the incidence of light, the number of molecules
which are affected is equal to the number of quanta of light which are
absorbed." Those who manage penny-in-the-slot machines are familiar
with a similar law: "the number of articles sold is exactly equal to the
number of coins in the machine."

If we think of energy in terms of its capacity for doing damage, we see
that radiation of short wave-length can work more destruction in atomic
structures than radiation of long wave-length—a circumstance with
which every photographer is painfully familiar; we can admit as much

EXPLORING THE ATOM 195

red light as we please without any damage being done, but even the
tiniest gleam of violet light spoils our plates. Radiation of sufficiently
short wave-length may not only rearrange molecules or atoms; it may
break up any atom oa which it happens to fall, by shooting out one of
its electrons, giving rise to what is known as photoelectric action. Again
there is a definite limit of frequency, such that light whose frequency
is below this limit does not produce any effect at all, no matter how in-
tense it may be; whereas as soon as we pass to frequencies above this
limit, light of even the feeblest intensity starts photoelectric action at
once. Again the absorption of one quantum breaks up only one atom,
and further ejects only one electron from the atom. If the radiation has
a frequency above this limit, so that its quantum has more energy than
the minimum necessary to remove a single electron from the atom, the
whole quantum is still absorbed, the excess energy now being used in
endowing the ejected electron with motion.

ELECTRON ORBITS. These concepts are based upon Bohr's supposition
that only a limited number of orbits are open to the electrons in an atom,
all others being prohibited for reasons which Bohr's theory did not fully
explain, and that an electron is free to move from one permitted orbit
to another under the stimulus of radiation. Bohr himself investigated the
way in which the various permitted orbits are arranged. Modern investi-
gations indicate the need for a good deal of revision of his simple concepts,
but we shall discuss these in some detail, partly because Bohr's picture of
the atom still provides the best working mechanical model we have, and
partly because an understanding of his simple theory is absolutely es-
sential to the understanding of the far more intricate theories which are
beginning to replace it.

The hydrogen atom, as we have already seen, consists of a single proton
as central nucleus, with a single electron revolving around it. The nucleus,
with about 1847 times the weight of the electron, stands practically at
rest unagitated by the motion of the latter, just as the sun remains practi-
cally undisturbed by the motion of the earth round it. The nucleus and
electron carry charges of positive and negative electricity, and therefore
attract one another; this is why the electron describes an orbit instead of
flying of? in a straight line, again like the earth and sun. Furthermore,
the attraction between electric charges of opposite sign, positive and
negative, follows, as it happens, precisely the same law as gravitation,
the attraction falling off as the inverse square of the distance between the
two charges. Thus the nucleus-electron system is similar in all respects
to a sun-planet system, and the orbits which an electron can describe
around a central nucleus are precisely identical with those which a planet

196 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

can describe about a central sun; they consist of a system of ellipses each
having the nucleus in one focus.

Yet the general concepts of quantum-dynamics prohibit the electron
from moving in all these orbits indiscriminately. Bohr's original theory
supposed that the electron in the hydrogen atom could move only in
certain circular orbits whose diameters were proportional to the squares
of the natural numbers, and so to i, 4, 9, 16, 25, .... Bohr subsequently
modified this very simple hypothesis, and the theory of wave-mechanics
has recently modified it much further.

Yet it still remains true that the hydrogen atom has always very approxi-
mately the same energy as it would have if the electron were describing
one or another of these simple orbits of Bohr. Thus, when its energy
changes, it changes as though the electron jumped over from one to another
of these orbits. For this reason it is easy to calculate what changes of
energy a hydrogen atom can experience — they are precisely those which
correspond to the passage from one Bohr orbit to another. For example,
the two orbits of smallest diameters in the hydrogen atom differ in energy
by i6Xio~12 erg. If we pour radiation of the appropriate wave-length on
to an atom in which the electron is describing the smallest orbit of all, it
crosses over to the next orbit, absorbing i6Xio"12 erg of energy in the
process, and so becoming temporarily a reservoir of energy holding 16
X io"12 erg. If the atom is in any way disturbed from outside, it may of
course discharge the energy at any time, or it may absorb still more
energy and so increase its store.

If we know all the orbits which are possible for an atom of any type, it
is easy to calculate the changes of energy involved in the various transi-
tions between them. As each transition absorbs or releases exactly one
quantum of energy, we can immediately deduce the frequencies of the
light emitted or absorbed in these transitions. In brief, given the arrange-
ment of atomic orbits, we can calculate the spectrum of the atom. In
practice the problem of course takes the converse form: given the spec-
trum, to find the structure of the atom which emits it. Bohr's model of
the hydrogen atom is a good model at least to this extent — that the spec-
trum it would emit reproduces the hydrogen spectrum almost exactly.
Yet the agreement is not quite perfect, and for this reason it is now
generally accepted that Bohr's scheme of orbits is inadequate to account
for actual spectra. We continue to discuss Bohr's scheme, not because the
atom is actually built that way, but because it provides a working model
which is good enough for our present purpose.

An essential, although at first sight somewhat unexpected, feature of
the whole theory is that even if the hydrogen atom charged with its

EXPLORING THE ATOM 197

16 X io"12 erg of energy is left entirely undisturbed, the electron must,
after a certain time, lapse back spontaneously to its original smaller orbit,
ejecting its 16 X io"12 erg of energy in the form of radiation in so doing.
Einstein shewed that, if this were not so, then Planck's well-established
"cavity-radiation" law could not be true. Thus, a collection of hydrogen
atoms in which the electrons describe orbits larger than the smallest pos-
sible orbit is similar to a collection of uranium or other radio-active atoms,
in that the atoms spontaneously fall back to their states of lower energy
as the result merely of the passage of time.

The electron orbits in more complicated atoms have much the same
general arrangement as in the hydrogen atom, but are different in size.
In the hydrogen atom the electron normally falls, after sufficient time, to
the orbit of lowest energy and stays there. It might be thought by analogy
that in more complicated atoms in which several electrons are describing
orbits, all the electrons would in time fall into the orbit of lowest energy
and stay there. Such does not prove to be the case. There is never room
for more than one electron in the same orbit. This is a special aspect of
a general principle which appears to dominate the whole of physics. It
has a name — "the exclusion-principle" — but this is about all as yet; we have
hardly begun to understand it. In another of its special aspects it becomes
identical with the old familiar cornerstone of science which asserts that
two different pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same
time. Without understanding the underlying principle, we can accept
the fact that two electrons not only cannot occupy the same space, but
cannot even occupy the same orbit. It is as though in some way the electron
spread itself out so as to occupy the whole of its orbit, thus leaving
room for no other. No doubt this must not be accepted as a literal
picture of things, and yet the modern theory of wave-mechanics sug-
gests that in some sense (which we cannot yet specify with much pre-
cision) the orbits of lowest energy in the hydrogen atom are possible orbits
just because the electron can completely fill them, and that adjacent orbits
are impossible because the electron would fill them t or ii times over,
and similarly for more complicated atoms. In this connection it is per-
haps significant that no single known phenomenon of physics makes it
possible to say that at a given instant an electron is at such or such a
point in an orbit of lowest energy; such a statement appears to be quite
meaningless and the condition of an atom is apparently specified with
all possible precision by saying that at a given instant an electron is in
such an orbit, as it would be, for instance, if the electron had spread
itself out into a ring. We cannot say the same of other orbits. As we pass
to orbits of higher energy, and so of greater diameter, the indeterminate-

198 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

ness gradually assumes a different form, and finally becomes of but little
importance. Whatever form the electron may assume while it is describ-
ing a little orbit near the nucleus, by the time it is describing a very
big orbit far out it has become a plain material particle charged with
electricity.

Thus, whatever the reason may be, electrons which are describing orbits
in the same atom must all be in different orbits. The electrons in their
orbits are like men on a ladder; just as no two men can stand on the
same rung, so no two electrons can ever follow one another round in the
same orbit. The neon atom, for instance, with 10 electrons is in its normal
state of lowest energy when its 10 electrons each occupy one of the 10
orbits whose energy is lowest. For reasons which the quantum theory has
at last succeeded in elucidating, there are, in every atom, two orbits in
which the energy is equal and lower than in any other orbit. After this
come eight orbits of equal but substantially higher energy, then 18 orbits
of equal but still higher energy, and so on. As the electrons in each
of these various groups of orbits all have equal energy, they are commonly
spoken of, in a graphic but misleading phraseology, as rings of electrons.
They are designated the K-ring, the L-ring, the M-ring and so on.
The ,K-ring, which is nearest to the nucleus, has room for two electrons
only. Any further electrons are pushed out into the L-ring, which has room
for eight electrons, all describing orbits which are different but of equal
energy. If still more electrons remain to be accommodated, they must
go into the M-ring and so on.

In its normal state, the hydrogen atom has one electron in its K~ring,
while the helium has two, the L, M, and higher rings being unoccupied.
The atom of next higher complexity, the lithium atom, has three electrons,
and as only two can be accommodated in its X-ring, one has to wander
round in the outer spaces of the L-ring. In beryllium with four electrons,
two are driven out into the L-ring. And so it goes on, until we reach
neon with 10 electrons, by which time the L-ring as well as the inner X-
ring is full up. In the next atom, sodium, one of the n electrons is
driven out into the still more remote M-ring, and so on. Provided the
electrons are not being excited by radiation or other stimulus, each atom
sinks in time to a state in which its electrons are occupying its orbits of
lowest energy, one in each.

So far as our experience goes, an atom, as soon as it reaches this
state, becomes a true perpetual motion machine, the electrons continuing
to move in their orbits (at any rate on Bohr's theory) without any of
the energy of their motion being dissipated away, either in the form of
radiation or otherwise. It seems astonishing and quire incomprehensible

EXPLORING THE ATOM 199

that an atom in such a state should not be able to yield up its energy
still further, but, so far as our experience goes, it cannot. And this
property, little though we understand it, is, in the last resort, responsible
for keeping the universe in being. If no restriction of this kind inter-
vened, the whole material energy of the universe would disappear in
the form of radiation in a few thousand-millionth parts of a second. If the
normal hydrogen atom were capable of emitting radiation in the way
demanded by the nineteenth-century laws of physics, it would, as a direct
consequence of this emission of radiation, begin to shrink at the rate of
over a metre a second, the electron continually falling to orbits of lower
and lower energy. After about a thousand-millionth part of a second the
nucleus and the electron would run into one another, and the whole atom
would probably disappear in a flash of radiation. By prohibiting any
emission of radiation except by complete quanta, and by prohibiting any
emission at all when there are no quanta available for dissipation, the
quantum theory succeeds in keeping the universe in existence as a going
concern.

It is difficult to form even the remotest conception of the realities under-
lying all these phenomena. The recent branch of physics known as
"wave mechanics" is at present groping after an understanding, but so
far progress has been in the direction of co-ordinating observed phenomena
rather than in getting down to realities. Indeed, it may be doubted
whether we shall ever properly understand the realities ultimately in-
volved; they may well be so fundamental as to be beyond the grasp of the
human mind.

It is just for this reason that modern theoretical physics is so difficult
to explain, and so difficult to understand. It is easy to explain the motion
of the earth round the sun in the solar system. We see the sun in the
sky; we feel the earth under our feet, and the concept of motion is
familiar to us from everyday experience. How different when we try
to explain the analogous motion of the electron round the proton in
the hydrogen atom! Neither you nor I have any direct experience of
either electrons or protons, and no one has so far any inkling of what
they are really like. So we agree to make a sort of model in which the
electron and proton are represented by the simplest things known to us,
tiny hard spheres. The model works well for a time and then suddenly
breaks in our hands. In the new light of the wave mechanics, the hard
sphere is seen to be hopelessly inadequate to represent the electron. A hard
sphere has always a definite position in space; the electron apparently
has not. A hard sphere takes up a very definite amount of room, an
electron— well, it is probably as meaningless to discuss how much room an

200 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

electron takes up as it is to discuss how much room a fear, an anxiety or
an uncertainty takes up, but if we are pressed to say how much room
an electron takes up, perhaps the best answer is that it takes up the whole
of space. A hard sphere moves from one point to the next; our model
electron, jumping from orbit to orbit in Bohr's model hydrogen atom,
certainly does not behave like any hard sphere of our waking experience,
and the real electron — if there is any such thing as a real electron —
probably even less. Yet as our minds have so far failed to conceive any
better picture of the atom than this very imperfect model, we can only
proceed by describing phenomena in terms of it.

Edition of 1934

Touring the Atomic World

LAWRENCE'S CYCLOTRON
HENRY SCHACHT

SOME TIME WHEN YOU HAVEN'T ANYTHING ELSE TO
do at the moment why not go on a trip into an invisible world ? No
money is required, no packing, or long, tiresome rides. Just a fertile imag-
ination. Pick up an object, any object, and look at it. Then imagine that
you are slowly shrinking in size. Say the object you are holding is a white
handkerchief. As you shrink, the handkerchief seems to expand enor-
mously. At first it looks as big as a circus tent. But you're still becoming
smaller. Now as you stand on the handkerchief, it forms a great, white
plain as far as your eye can see. Still you grow smaller, and you become
aware that great cracks are opening in your white plain. These aren't the
result of an earthquake, nor the crevasses in a glacier. They simply prove
that no matter how tightly woven your handkerchief may seem to be there
are spaces between the threads. As you grow smaller still, the spaces seem
to widen and the threads, themselves, become larger. You can sit on one
now and hang your feet over the side.

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD 201

The thread seems to be a very safe place. Soon you can wander around
on top of it, looking over the side and enjoying your trip to the utmost.
But there are still surprises to come. As yet you aren't even within sight
of the invisible world you have started out to visit. Still, you're getting
there. For now the ground — or rather the thread — is beginning to open up
beneath your feet. You see, you're still diminishing in size. In comparison,
the thread is still becoming larger. Now you're beginning to find from
first hand experience that threads are made up of fibers. And there are
spaces between the fibers, just as there are between the threads. So you
pick your way carefully along first one fiber and then another, being care-
ful not to fall into the canyons between them. This seems easy until you
find that the fibers themselves are beginning to show gaps. The one that
at first was just a platform on which you stood is now assuming giant
proportions, stretching away in all directions. You seem to be getting so
small that you can just sink right through it. And that's exactly what is
happening, for you slip through the surface of the fiber, disappear into it.
And the next thing you know you're falling through space, like someone
pitched out of a Buck Rogers spaceship.

As you fall, you see all about you planets and suns and moons. They are
arranged into tight little solar systems. And then, if you know your atomic
physics, you'll realize that you have arrived in the hitherto invisible world
of the atoms. You are falling through an ultramicroscopic universe, peo-
pled by solar systems so infinitesimal that billions of them are contained
in the fiber you have just slipped through. Yet there is still room for your
much shrunken body to pass without even grazing them. Now you can
pick out those sections of the atom that you were told about in school.
You can see the bodies that look like planets and moons rotating around a
central sun. You know that those are the electrons, electrical particles hav-
ing a negative electrical charge. Then you turn your attention to the cen-
tral sun, itself. You know that this is the nucleus of the atom, the impor-
tant central mass that determines the character of the entire atomic solar
system. It is made up of a number of different particles, known variously
as protons, mesotrons, and neutrons. You can see all these things. But,
unfortunately, that is as far as you can go. You cannot explore them
freely as you have explored the handkerchief. For such a journey you need
a special passport available to only a few men on earth. Even they have
not yet developed the last passport of all, the one that will allow them to
solve all the mysteries of the nucleus of the atom.

The man who has come closest to making the entire trip through the
invisible atomic world is Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, developer of the world
famous cyclotron on the University of California campus and winner of

202 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

that most coveted award, the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1939. Shake off
your imaginative spell, come back to your normal size, and let's go over
the story of Dr. Lawrence's trips into the atomic unknown. After your
journey you have the proper perspective to appreciate the difficulties he
and his colleagues have overcome and those they hope to overcome in the
near future. You know now from your own experience that nothing we
can see in this world of ours is solid no matter how it feels to the touch.
Everything we use, everything that we see, feel, touch, or taste is made
in the final analysis, not of those things that we call paper, or sugar, or salt,
or wood, but of tiny solar systems, called atoms, ultramicroscopic worlds
which no one yet has ever completely explored, but which hold the secret
to a possible re-making of our world in the forms which we desire. So,
having familiarized yourself with the invisible world through your imag-
inative journey, take another mind's eye tour with the writer, this time
to the University of California campus where in the Radiation Laboratory
we pick up the story of one of science's most valuable and remarkable
developments, the cyclotron.

This machine, now copied in all parts of the world, was first set in oper-
ation at the University in 1929. It was the answer to a physicist's dream
and proof of the old saw that necessity is the mother of invention. Physi-
cists had been interested in atoms for many years. They knew about their
arrangement with the electrons whirling in orbits about the central
nucleus. They also knew that the proportion of negative and positive
charges in the nucleus and the number of these charges present (in other
words, the pattern and size of the nucleus) determined whether the atom
was one of hydrogen gas, carbon, gold, iron, molybdenum, or some other
element. However, this knowledge was not enough. What the physicists
wanted to do was to tear the atomic world apart and see what made it tick.
This, as they knew, was by no means an easy task.

The atom is like a case-hardened steel safe without lock or combination.
You can break into it only by main force and its resistance is powerful.
Around itself it sets up a field of force which presents a stout barricade
against invasion. The nucleus is tightly held together by the mutual elec-
trical attraction of the particles from which it is formed. This sets up a
second barrier. And, finally, the atom's lack of size works to the disadvan-
tage of anyone attempting to explore its mysteries. After your imagina-
tive journey through the handkerchief, you probably won't be surprised
to find that atoms are so small it would take the entire population of the
earth ten thousand years to count the number of them in a drop of water.
Even then each individual counter would have to be reduced to one-bil-
lionth of an inch in height in order to see an atom. At that he would be

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD 203

several cuts larger than you were when you fell through the fiber into the
atomic universe. So you see the atom's lack of size presents a real prob-
lem. The use of any ordinary weapon in an assault on the nucleus would
be like using a sledge hammer to break into a grain of dust. What is
required is some force small enough to enter the atom and still powerful
enough to break down the electrical barricades surrounding it.

Lord Rutherford, the famous English physicist, found such a force in
the natural rays emitted by radium. These are called "alpha rays" by the
scientists and are composed of steady streams of helium atoms thrown out
at a pace of approximately 10,000 miles per second. They are caused by the
disintegration of the radium. In 1919 Lord Rutherford used these rays to
perform the first known transmutation of elements; or the act of changing
one element into another. The ancient alchemists tried to perform trans-
mutation by heating base metals with what they called "philosopher's
stone" to produce gold. Much to their dismay gold was never produced.
Lord Rutherford went about his transmutation operations in quite a dif-
ferent way. He sent "alpha rays" crashing into the nuclei of nitrogen gas
atoms and, after the shooting was over, out came oxygen. This may seem
complicated but it was really very simple. All that happened was that the
"alpha rays" crashing into the nitrogen atoms knocked a few particles out
of their nuclei. The nature of any element is dependent upon the size and
pattern of its nucleus, and the nuclei of the nitrogen atoms were so rear-
ranged that a new element, oxygen, was formed.

The success of Lord Rutherford's experiments set physicists all over the
world at bombarding atoms with the rays of radium. Soon they found
that when atomic nuclei were rearranged under the impact of a flying
particle, tremendous amounts of energy were released. This energy, it
appeared, was locked up inside the atom, and, when a few particles were
split off the nucleus, some of the power leaked out. A little of it would go
a long, long way. For the sub-atomic energy, as the power is called, locked
up in the nuclei of the atoms in a fraction of a pint of water would drive
a battleship from New York to Liverpool and back again. Physicists were
greatly intrigued by the knowledge that some of this energy could be
released by bombarding and partially breaking up the nuclei of atoms. It
revived the hope that some day atomic energy of which there is a great
and unfailing source might be used, instead of steam or electricity, to turn
the wheels of the world's factories.

Yet for all their speculation as to what these discoveries might mean
the physicists still knew that radium was not the ideal atom-blaster they
sought. They were really in the same position as the medical men before
the invention of the microscope, and the astronomers before the invention

204 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

of the telescope. These two inventions revolutionized medicine and
astronomy. The physicists stood on the threshold of discoveries that would
revolutionize our knowledge of the structure of the world and everything
that lives on it. They needed another passport into the unknown. Radium
had provided them with entry into the problem. But radium was too
expensive for one thing and also it was not a very copious source of "alpha
rays." A search began for some other method of smashing atoms, and thus
the stage was set for Dr. E. O. Lawrence and his now-famous cyclotron.

Lawrence, who was only beginning his University career at that time,
had abandoned the idea of searching for some 'force strong enough nat-
urally to break into the atomic citadel. Instead he proposed to take some
weaker force and step it up by degrees until finally when unleashed, it
could overpower the atom's defense. Or at least storm a -section of the
barricade. To test his theory he built the first cyclotron, an almost pocket-
sized model. It worked, as did a series of other slightly larger ones. So Dr.
Lawrence began laying his plans for a machine that could really generate
some power. The old Federal Telegraph Company had been forced in
1918 to abandon its plans for constructing a wireless station in China. As
a result, Federal still had a 6o-ton magnet on* its hands. Dr. Leonard F.
Fuller, then vice-president of Federal and in his' first year as -chairman of
the department of electrical engineering at the University, persuaded the
board of directors to give the magnet to Dr. Lawrence. Around it the
young physicist built an 85-ton cyclotron, the first really efficient atom-
smasher the world was to know.

Of course, Dr. Lawrence and his co-workers at the Radiation Labora-
tory had no inkling that they were about to turn the physical world topsy-
turvy. They just hoped the monster would work as well in fact as it did
on paper.

On paper it was all very simple. First, a circular chamber was placed
between the poles of the magnet. Then all air was removed from the
chamber and heavy hydrogen gas allowed to- flow in. This so-called heavy
hydrogen behaves in the same way as ordinary hydrogen. However, while
the nuclei of ordinary hydrogen atoms contain one positively charged par-
ticle, or proton, heavy hydrogen nuclei contain two such particles plus
one electron. Consequently, they weigh just twice as much as the nuclei
of ordinary hydrogen atoms. They are known as deuterons.

The deuteron's added weight makes it an ideal atomic bullet. And here
is how Dr. Lawrence planned to send streams of deuterons crashing into
the nuclei of other atoms in a constant, destructive barrage: Inside the
cyclotron chamber was a heated filament that emitted streams of elec-
trons. These particles would collide with the electrons surrounding the

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD 205

nuclei of the hydrogen atoms and in the ensuing mixup the nuclei and
their satellites would become separated. The deuterons would be left free
to float around the chamber. Eventually, the magnetic force set up by the
cyclotron's magnet would pull them between two metal grids separated
by a space across which an alternating electrical current of ten or fifteen
thousand volts would be operating. As the deuterons floated into this
space, they would receive a heavy shock, and under this stimulus fly off
to'ward the side of the chamber. But the magnetic field would pull them
back again in a semi-circular path until they again came between the two
grids. Again they would be shocked and be sent flying out toward the
side. Ancl again the magnet would pull them back to complete one full
circle of the chamber and be shocked again.

At each jolt from the current the deuterons would gather more energy.
This meant that they would go flying out from between the grids with
constantly increasing force and in constantly widening circles. So you get
the picture of the atomic bullets receiving shocks one right after thfe^other
from a weak electrical force. Each time the bullets receive a shock their
energy is increased and they go on, describing wider and wider circles
around the cyclotron chamber. Finally, they circle so widely that they
reach a slit in the chamber wall and go flying out into the open air. The
whole secret of the thing lies in making sure by means of the magnet that
the atomic bullets are forced to come back for successive shocks until their
energy is built up to the point where they can force their way to the exit.
Dr. Lawrence figured that to bombard any substance with his atomic bul-
lets, all he had to do was clamp this substance over the slit and let the
onrushing stream of deuterons crash into it. This then was the theory put
to the crucial test in 1934 at the University Radiation Laboratory. Dr.
Lawrence threw the switch that sent a high-powered radio transmitter
pumping energy into the cyclotron and the first experiment with the 85-
ton machine had begun.

If he and his colleagues held their collective breath during the first test,
the results soon showed that their fear$ were without grounds. Within a
short time, physicists were amazed to hear that Lawrence and his cyclo-
tron were not only changing familiar elements like platinum, into other
elements, like iridium and gold, but were actually producing substances
never before seen on earth. These were the artificially radioactive ele-
ments. Perhaps their character is best explained by illustration.

One of the experiments performed with the cyclotron involved the bom-
bardment of iron atoms with the high-speed deuterons produced by the
cyclotron. When the deuterons crashed into them with a force of about
eight million volts, the iron atoms were broken up. Some changed into

206 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

atoms of cobalt or manganese. But others were converted into a new form
of iron which, like radium, emitted streams of electrically charged par-
ticles. In other words, this new iron was radioactive. Thirty-four different
elements were subjected to bombardment with the 85-ton cyclotron and
all of them underwent a transformation, many turning into radioactive
substances. Among the artificial radioactive materials produced by the
cyclotron were sodium, phosphorus, iron, and iodine. It was even pos-
sible by bombarding bismuth to produce a degenerate form of radium,
called Radium E.

Another interesting product of these atomic bombardments was the
neutron, a particle often found in the atomic nucleus. It adds to the weight
of the nucleus but has no electrical charge, hence its name. When atoms
were smashed by the bullets from the cyclotron, they flew into two parts.
One might be an atom of a new radioactive element, and the other an
atom of a light element such as hydrogen or helium. But more often than
either of these two, a neutron would appear. When the cyclotron was
going full blast, ten billion of these particles could be liberated every
second.

While neutrons are important as building-blocks of nature, they are
also worthy of notice for their ability to destroy matter. A fast neutron
rolling along at the speed of light has tremendous penetrating power.
So great is this power, in fact, that even though the 225-ton machine is
surrounded by lead water tanks and tin cans full of water and is inside
a laboratory with thick concrete walls neutrons produced by its atomic
bombardments have been detected as far as 100 yards from the building.
When the neutrons are slowed up by passage through a sheet of paraffine,
they lose part of their penetrating power, at the same time gaining tre-
mendously in their ability to smash anything placed in their path.
Physicists have taken advantage of this phenomenon. They are using
slow neutrons for many experiments in which a high-powered sub-
atomic bullet is required.

At present the slow neutron is the bully boy being groomed for the
final day when physicists hope to break into the treasure-house of atomic
energy.

To continue his research on the fundamental problem of atomic struc-
ture Dr. Lawrence plans to build a 4900-ton cyclotron, approximately
twenty-two times as large as the 225-ton machine which is itself the
largest atom-smasher of its kind in the world. This monster would cost
from a million to a million and a half dollars. This is a great deal of
money but let's see what it would buy. . . .

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD 207

Dr. Lawrence points out that even the tremendously powerful atomic
bullets thrown out by the 225-ton cyclotron have not yet forced a com-
plete capitulation of the atomic citadel. They can split off only a few of
the particles of the nucleus. Before physicists can solve the fundamental
problem of the forces that bind together the atomic nucleus it is necessary
that this tight little core of the atom be completely torn apart. An atomic
"explosion" must be provoked.

. . . The laboratory in which these tremendous forces will be unleashed
for atomic study will be placed far from the campus proper. We have
already seen how the 225-ton cyclotron produces rays that pass through
thick lead tanks full of water, through the concrete sides of the Radiation
Laboratory, and out for more than 100 yards across the campus of the
University. These forces are relatively weak in comparison with those
that would be produced by a 4900-ton machine. Probably no practicable
amount of artificial sheathing would cut down the radiation reaching the
outside sufficiently. So the plans now are to place the machine and the
laboratory in a great building in Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley
Hills. Then at least 500 feet will separate the cyclotron from its innocent
neighbors. To protect the laboratory staff from the tremendous amount
of radiation that will be produced, the machine will be surrounded by
lead water jackets 15 feet thick. It is possible also that the control room
may be placed underground so that the earth will provide an additional
buffer between the cyclotron and its operators.

In the higher energy ranges within reach of the 4900-ton cyclotron
and with the much more powerful atomic bullets produced by this tre-
mendous machine entirely new forms of radiation and entirely new sub-
stances will be produced and put to the service of mankind. Identity of
these radiations and substances can only be guessed at but certainly they
will prove of the greatest importance not only as additions to our funda-
mental knowledge of the behavior of atoms but also as contributions to
industry, biology, and medicine. It may be possible with the 4900-ton
cyclotron to transmute any element into another at will, to produce any
known substance and many new ones to order. This would give us com-
plete mastery of all the physical elements. Still it wouldn't touch the pos-
sibilities of the achievement Dr. Lawrence is really working toward: lib-
eration of the power contained in the atomic nucleus.

Let's review again the facts concerning this power. The nucleus makes
up more than 99 per cent of the mass of the atom and contains more than
99 per cent of the atom's energy. This store of energy has never been
tapped for useful purposes. Nevertheless, we know it must be tremen-
dous. Radium releases enough energy to raise its own weight in water tc

208 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

the boiling point every hour and it continues to give off this energy for
thousands of years. Nor is radium unique. Locked within the nuclei of
commoner and less expensive elements are like funds of power. At the
Radiation Laboratory Dr. Malcolm Henderson, a physicist on leave from
Princeton University, bombarded 13 grams of uranium. He found that
each uranium atom he was able to split gave off 175,000,000 electron volts
of energy. From those results he calculated that eight pounds of uranium
contain as much power as 6,300 tons of fuel oil, and that a little over a
half-pound of uranium would warm a ton of water to 3,860,000 degrees
Centigrade, or convert 386,000 tons of ice water into boiling water. If
such vast amounts of energy could be released and harnessed for practical
purposes we would never again have to worry over depletion of our sup-
plies of coal and oil. Conservation of natural resources would become but
an empty phrase that once was popular when men still depended upon
minerals for power and heat.

Now how to release this energy? You'll remember our sub-atomic
bruiser, the slow neutron. On his shoulders rest the hopes of Dr. Lawrence
and his Radiation Laboratory staff. Here is how they hope to put him to
work. First, they will build up the power in the 49Oo-ton cyclotron until it
is producing streams of deuterons or helium atoms carrying energies of
more than 100 million volts. These charged particles will be sent crashing
into some element, probably uranium at first because it has been used
before in such experiments. Under the tremendous impact of the atomic
bullets, atoms of this element will be shattered. Great clouds of slow neu-
trons will be released. With their power to destroy they will blast more
atoms of the element, releasing more neutrons to impact on and shatter
more atoms. With each of these shattering blows energy in excess of 175,-
000,000 volts will be released. Thus will be achieved the "chain reaction,"
or chain of atomic explosions, that has been hoped for and which should
be attainable with the 4900-ton cyclotron.

When I went to see Dr. Lawrence, I was a bit worried about what
might happen when this chain reaction started. After all, there would be
an almost unbelievable amount of energy released. What if they couldn't
stop the reaction and it just kept going on releasing more and more
energy? There might be a terrific outburst that would send cyclotron,
Nobel prize winner and everything else sailing up into the sky. But when
I broached this question, Dr. Lawrence just smiled and said, "Well, that's
not really such a great danger because the neutron's own properties will
protect us from such an eventuality. You see, the slow neutron has great
disintegrating power. We'll use this power to release the sub-atomic
energy. But as the explosions continue, the element we are breaking up
will become white hot. As the temperature rises, the neutrons will streak

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM 209

along at a constantly faster pace. As you know, a neutron loses in disinte-
grating power and gains in penetrating power as it speeds up. Pretty soon
all these neutrons released will be just passing through the atoms without
destroying them and the reaction will come to a natural conclusion. But
by that time we'll already have obtained enough energy to last us a good
long while."

'94°

The Discovery of Radium

EVE CURIE

From Madame Curie

WHILE A YOUNG WIFE KEPT HOUSE, WASHED HER
baby daughter and put pans on the fire, in a wretched laboratory
at the School of Physics a woman physicist was making the most impor-
tant discovery of modern science.

At the end of 1897 the balance sheet of Marie's activity showed two
university degrees, a fellowship and a monograph on the magnetization
of tempered steel. No sooner had she recovered from childbirth than she
was back again at the laboratory.

The next stage in the logical development of her career was the doctor's
degree. Several weeks of indecision came in here. She had to choose a
subject of research which would furnish fertile and original material. Like
a writer who hesitates and asks himself questions before settling the sub-
ject of his next novel, Marie, reviewing the most recent work in physics
with Pierre, was in search of a subject for a thesis.

At this critical moment Pierre's advice had an importance which can-
not be neglected. With respect to her husband, the young woman regarded
herself as an apprentice: he was an older physicist, much more experi-
enced than she. He was even, to put it exactly, her chief, her "boss."

210 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

But without a doubt Marie's character, her intimate nature, had a great
part in this all-important choice. From childhood the Polish girl had car-
ried the curiosity and daring of an explorer within her. This was the in-
stinct that had driven her to leave Warsaw for Paris and the Sorbonne,
and had made her prefer a solitary room in the Latin Quarter to the
Dluskis' downy nest. In her walks in the woods she always chose the
wild trail or the unfrequented road.

At this moment she was like a traveler musing on a long voyage. Bent
over the globe and pointing out, in some far country, a strange name that
excites his imagination, the traveler suddenly decides to go there and no-
where else: so Marie, going through the reports of the latest experimental
studies, was attracted by the publication of the French scientist Henri Bec-
querel of the preceding year. She and Pierre already knew this work; she
read it over again and studied it with her usual care.

After Roentgen's discovery of X rays, Henri Poincare conceived the
idea of determining whether rays like the X ray were emitted by "flu-
orescent" bodies under the action of light. Attracted by the same problem,
Henri Becquerel examined the salts of a "rare metal," uranium. Instead
of finding the phenomenon he had expected, he observed another, alto-
gether different and incomprehensible : he found that uranium salts spon-
taneously emitted, without exposure to light, some rays of unknown na
ture. A compound of uranium, placed on a photographic plate surrounded
by black paper, made an impression on the plate through the paper. And,
like the X ray, these astonishing "uranic" salts discharged an electroscope
by rendering the surrounding air a conductor.

Henri Becquerel made sure that these surprising properties were not
caused by a preliminary exposure to the sun and that they persisted when
the uranium compound had been maintained in darkness for several
months. For the first time, a physicist had observed the phenomenon to
which Marie Curie was later to give the name of radioactivity. But the
nature of the radiation and its origin remained an enigma.

Becquerel's discovery fascinated the Curies. They asked themselves
whence came the energy — tiny, to be sure — which uranium compounds
constantly disengaged in the form of radiation. And what was the nature
of this radiation? Here was an engrossing subject of research, a doctor's
thesis! The subject tempted Marie most because it was a virgin field:
Becquerel's work was very recent and so far as she knew nobody in the
laboratories of Europe had yet attempted to make a fundamental study
of uranium rays. As a point of departure, and as the only bibliography,
there existed some communications presented by Henri Becquerel at the

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM 211

Academy of Science during the year 1896. It was a leap into great adven-
ture, into an unknown realm.

There remained the question o£ where she was to make her experi-
ments— and here the difficulties began. Pierre made several approaches to
the director of the School of Physics with practically no results: Marie was
given the free use of a little glassed-in studio on the ground floor of the
school. It was a kind of storeroom, sweating with damp, where unused
machines and lumber were put away. Its technical equipment was rudi-
mentary and its comfort nil.

Deprived of an adequate electrical installation and of everything that
forms material for the beginning of scientific research, she kept her pa-
tience, sought and found a means of making her apparatus work in this
hole.

It was not easy. Instruments of precision have sneaking enemies: humid-
ity, changes of temperature. Incidentally the climate of this little work-
room, fatal to the sensitive electrometer, was not much better for Marie's
health. But this had no importance. When she was cold, the young woman
took her revenge by noting the degrees of temperature in centigrade in
her notebook. On February 6, 1898, we find, among the formulas and
figures: "Temperature here 6° '25. [About 44° Fahrenheit.] Six de-
grees . . . !" Marie, to show her disapproval, added ten little exclamation
points.

The candidate for the doctor's degree set her first task to be the measure-
ment of the "power of ionization" of uranium rays — that is to say, their
power to render the air a conductor of electricity and so to discharge an
electroscope. The excellent method she used, which was to be the key to
the success of her experiments, had been invented for the study of other
phenomena by two physicists well known to her: Pierre and Jacques
Curie. Her technical installation consisted of an "ionization chamber," a
Curie electrometer and a piezoelectric quartz.

At the end of several weeks the first result appeared: Marie acquired
the certainty that the intensity of this surprising radiation was propor-
tional to the quantity of uranium contained in the samples under exam-
ination, and that this radiation, which could be measured with precision,
was not affected either by the chemical state of combination of the ura-
nium or by external factors such as lighting or temperature.

These observations were perhaps not very sensational to the uninitiated,
but they were of passionate interest to the scientist. It often happens in
physics that an inexplicable phenomenon can be subjected, after some in-
vestigation, to laws already known, and by this very fact loses its interest
for the research worker. Thus, in a badly constructed detective story, if we

212 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

are told in the third chapter that the woman of sinister appearance who
might have committed the crime is in reality only an honest little house-
wife who leads a life without secrets, we feel discouraged and cease to
read.

Nothing of the kind happened here. The more Marie penetrated into
intimacy with uranium rays, the more they seemed without precedent,
essentially unknown. They were like nothing else. Nothing affected them.
In spite of their very feeble power, they had an extraordinary individuality.

Turning this mystery over and over in her head, and pointing toward
the truth, Marie felt and could soon affirm that the incomprehensible
radiation was an atomic property. She questioned: Even though the phe-
nomenon had only been observed with uranium, nothing proved that
uranium was the only chemical element capable of emitting such radia-
tion. Why should not other bodies possess the same power? Perhaps it
was only by chance that this radiation had been observed in uranium first,
and had remained attached to uranium in the minds of physicists. Now it
must be sought for elsewhere. . . .

No sooner said than done. Abandoning the study of uranium, Marie
undertook to examine all \nown chemical bodies, either in the pure state
or in compounds. And the result was not long in appearing: compounds
of another element, thorium, also emitted spontaneous rays like those of
uranium and of similar intensity. The physicist had been right: the sur-
prising phenomenon was by no means the property of uranium alone, and
it became necessary to give it a distinct name. Mme Curie suggested the
name of radioactivity. Chemical substances like uranium and thorium,
endowed with this particular "radiance," were called radio elements.

Radioactivity so fascinated the young scientist that she never tired of
examining the most diverse forms of matter, always by the same method.
Curiosity, a marvelous feminine curiosity, the first virtue of a scientist,
was developed in Marie to the highest degree. Instead of limiting her ob-
servation to simple compounds, salts and oxides, she had the desire to
assemble samples of minerals from the collection at the School of Physics,
and of making them undergo almost at hazard, for her own amusement,
a kind of customs inspection which is an electrometer test. Pierre ap-
proved, and chose with her the veined fragments, hard or crumbly, oddly
shaped, which she wanted to examine.

Marie's idea was simple — simple as the stroke of genius. At the cross-
roads where Marie now stood, hundreds of research workers might have
remained, nonplussed, for months or even years. After examining all
known chemical substances, and discovering — as Marie had done — the
radiation of thorium, they would have continued to ask themselves in

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM 213

vain whence came this mysterious radioactivity. Marie, too, questioned
and wondered. But her surprise was translated into fruitful acts. She had
used up all evident possibilities. Now she turned toward the unplumbed
and the unknown.

She knew in advance what she would learn from an examination of
the minerals, or rather she thought she knew. The specimens which con-
tained neither uranium nor thorium would be revealed as totally "inac-
tive." The others, containing uranium or thorium, would be radioactive.

Experiment confirmed this prevision. Rejecting the inactive minerals,
Marie applied herself to the others and measured their radioactivity. Then
came a dramatic revelation: the radioactivity was a great deal stronger
than could have been normally foreseen by the quantity of uranium or
thorium contained in the products examined!

"It must be an error in experiment," the young woman thought; for
doubt is the scientist's first response to an unexpected phenomenon.

She started her measurements over again, unmoved, using the same
products. She started over again ten times, twenty times. And she was
forced to yield to the evidence: the quantities of uranium found in these
minerals were by no means sufficient to justify the exceptional intensity
of the radiation she observed.

Where did this excessive and abnormal radiation come from? Only
one explanation was possible: the minerals must contain, in small quan-
tity, a much more powerfully radioactive substance than uranium and
thorium.

But what substance? In her preceding experiments, Marie had already
examined all \nown chemical elements.

The scientist replied to the question with the sure logic and the mag-
nificent audaciousness of a great mind: The mineral certainly contained
a radioactive substance, which was at the same time a chemical element
unknown until this day: a new element.

A new element! It was a fascinating and alluring hypothesis — but still
a hypothesis. For the moment this powerfully radioactive substance existed
only in the imagination of Marie and of Pierre. But it did exist there. It
existed strongly enough to make the young woman go to see Bronya one
day and tell her in a restrained, ardent voice:

"You know, Bronya, the radiation that I couldn't explain comes from
a new chemical element. The element is there and I've got to find it. We
are sure! The physicists we have spoken to believe we have made an error
in experiment and advise us to be careful. But I am convinced that I am
not mistaken."

214 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

These were unique moments in her unique life. The layman forms a
theatrical— and wholly false— idea of the research worker and of his dis-
coveries. "The moment of discovery" does not always exist: the scientist's
work is too tenuous, too divided, for the certainty of success to crackle out
suddenly in the midst of his laborious toil like a stroke of lightning, daz-
zling him by its fire. Marie, standing in front of her apparatus, perhaps
never experienced the sudden intoxication of triumph. This intoxication
was spread over several days of decisive labor, made feverish by a mag-
nificent hope. But it must have been an exultant moment when, convinced
by the rigorous reasoning of her brain that she was on the trail of new
matter, she confided the secret to her elder sister, her ally always. . . .
Without exchanging one affectionate word, the two sisters must have lived
again, in a dizzying breath of memory, their years of waiting, their mutual
sacrifices, their bleak lives as students, full of hope and faith.

It was barely four years before that Marie had written:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have persever-
ance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are
gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

That "something" was to throw science upon a path hitherto unsus-
pected.

In a first communication to the Academy, presented by Prof. Lipp-
mann and published in the Proceedings on April 12, 1898, "Marie Sklodov-
ska Curie" announced the probable presence in pitchblende ores of a new
element endowed with powerful radioactivity. This was the first stage of
the discovery of radium.

By the force of her own intuition the physicist had shown to herself
that the wonderful substance must exist. She decreed its existence. But its
incognito still had to be broken. Now she would have to verify hypothesis
by experiment, isolate this material and see it. She must be able to
announce with certainty: "It is there."

Pierre Curie had followed the rapid progress of his wife's experiments
with passionate interest. Without directly taking part in Marie's work, he
had frequently helped her by his remarks and advice. In view of the
stupefying character of her results, he did not hesitate to abandon his study
of crystals for the time being in order to join his efforts to hers in the search
for the new substance.

Thus, when the immensity of a pressing task suggested and exacted
collaboration, a great physicist was at Marie's side — a physicist who was
the companion of her life. Three years earlier, love had joined this excep-

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM 215

tional man and woman together — love, and perhaps some mysterious fore-
knowledge, some sublime instinct for the work in common.

The valuable force was now doubled. Two brains, four hands, now
sought the unknown element in the damp little workroom in the Rue
Lhomond. From this moment onward it is impossible to distinguish each
one's part in the work of the Curies. We know that Marie, having chosen
to study the radiation of uranium as the subject of her thesis, discovered
that other substances were also radioactive. We know that after the ex-
amination of minerals she was able to announce the existence of a new
chemical element, powerfully radioactive, and that it was the capital im-
portance of this result which decided Pierre Curie to interrupt his very
different research in order to try to isolate this element with his wife. At
that time — May or June, 1898 — a collaboration began which was to last
for eight years, until it was destroyed by a fatal accident.

We cannot and must not attempt to find out what should be credited to
Marie and what to Pierre during these eight years. It would be exactly
what the husband and wife did not want. The personal genius of Pierre
Curie is known to us by the original work he had accomplished before this
collaboration. His wife's genius appears to us in the first intuition of dis-
covery, the brilliant start; and it was to reappear to us again, solitary, when
Marie Curie the widow unflinchingly carried the weight of a new science
and conducted it, through research, step by step, to its harmonious ex-
pansion. We therefore have formal proof that in the fusion of their two
efforts, in this superior alliance of man and woman, the exchange was
equal.

Let this certainly suffice for our curiosity and admiration. Let us not
attempt to separate these creatures full of love, whose handwriting alter-
nates and combines in the working notebooks covered with formulae,
these creatures who were to sign nearly all their scientific publications to-
gether. They were to write "We found" and "We observed"; and when
they were constrained by fact to distinguish between their parts, they were
to employ this moving locution :

Certain minerals containing uranium and thorium (pitchblende, chal-
colite, uranite) are very active from the point of view of the emission of
Becquerel rays. In a preceding communication, one of us showed that their
activity was even greater than that of uranium and thorium, and stated the
opinion that this effect was due to some other very active substance contained
in small quantity in these minerals.

(Pierre and Marie Curie: Proceedings of the Academy of Science, July 18,
1898.)

216 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Marie and Pierre looked for this "very active" substance in an ore of
uranium called pitchblende, which in the crude state had shown itself to
be four times more radioactive than the pure oxide of uranium that could
be extracted from it. But the composition of this ore had been known for
a long time with considerable precision. The new element must therefore
be present in very small quantity or it would not have escaped the notice
of scientists and their chemical analysis.

According to their calculations — "pessimistic" calculations, like those
of true physicists, who always take the less attractive of two probabilities
— the collaborators thought the ore should contain the new element to a
maximum quantity of one per cent. They decided that this was very little.
They would have been in consternation if they had known that the radio-
active element they were hunting down did not count for more than a
millionth part of pitchblende ore.

They began their prospecting patiently, using a method of chemical
research invented by themselves, based on radioactivity; they separated all
the elements in pitchblende by ordinary chemical analysis and then
measured the radioactivity of each of the bodies thus obtained. By suc-
cessive eliminations they saw the "abnormal" radioactivity take refuge in
certain parts of the ore. As they went on, the field of investigation was
narrowed. It was exactly the technique used by the police when they
search the houses of a neighborhood, one by one, to isolate and arrest a
malefactor.

But there was more than one malefactor here: the radioactivity was
concentrated principally in two different chemical fractions of the pitch-
blende. For M. and Mme Curie it indicated the existence of two new ele-
ments instead of one. By July 1898 they were able to announce the dis-
covery of one of these substances with certainty.

"You will have to name it," Pierre said to his young wife, in the same
tone as if it were a question of choosing a name for little Irene.

The one-time Mile Sklodovska reflected in silence for a moment. Then,
her heart turning toward her own country which had been erased from the
map of the world, she wondered vaguely if the scientific event would be
published in Russia, Germany and Austria — the oppressor countries — and
answered timidly :

"Could we call it 'polonium'?"

In the Proceedings of the Academy for July 1898 we read:

We believe the substance we have extracted from pitchblende contains a
metal not yet observed, related to bismuth by its analytical properties. If the
existence of this new metal is confirmed we propose to call it polonium,
from the name of the original country of one of us.

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM 217

The choice of this name proves that in becoming a Frenchwoman and
a physicist Marie had not disowned her former enthusiasms. Another
thing proves it for us : even before the note "On a New Radioactive Sub-
stance Contained in Pitchblende" had appeared in the Proceedings of the
Academy, Marie had sent the manuscript to her native country, to that
Joseph Boguski who directed the little laboratory at the Museum of In-
dustry and Agriculture where she had made her first experiments. The
communication was published in Warsaw in a monthly photographic
review called Swiatlo almost as soon as in Paris. . . .

We find another note worthy of remark.

It was drawn up by Marie and Pierre Curie and a collaborator called
G. Bemont. Intended for the Academy of Science, and published in the
Proceedings of the session of December 26, 1898, it announced the existence
of a second new chemical element in pitchblende.

Some lines of this communication read as follows:

The various reasons we have just enumerated lead us to believe that the
new radioactive substance contains a new element to which we propose to
give the name of RADIUM.

The new radioactive substance certainly contains a very strong proportion
of barium; in spite of that its radioactivity is considerable. The radioactivity
of radium therefore must be enormous.

The Taming of Energy

GEORGE RUSSELL HARRISON

From Atoms in Action

YESTERDAY WAS SUNNY OR CLOUDY, A
June day or a day in December, enough energy fell on the earth
during that twenty-four hours to serve humanity for several centuries —
enough to keep the world's furnaces roasting and its refrigerators icy, to
spin its wheels and refine its ores, and to fill for several hundred years every
other present need for power. The wheels of civilization are kept turning
by energy; and all this energy, whether we draw it from a gallon of gaso-
line, a ton of coal, or a pound of butter, has come to us from the sun.

So long as the sun keeps shining we appear to have little cause to worry
about running out of energy, and the best evidence indicates that our pow-
erhouse in the heavens will still be glowing brilliantly a billion years from
now. Unfortunately, however, most of the energy we are now using came
from the sun in ages past, and we are drawing heavily on the earth's sav-
ings account of coal and oil instead of using our current energy income.
Even though the sun sends us two hundred thousand times as much power
as we use, most of this slips through our fingers, because we have not yet
learned how to convert sunlight efficiently into those forms of energy
which are useful for civilized living.

Select on a map any convenient desert, and look at an area twenty miles
square — an area which would about cover the sprawling environs of a
great city. Year after year enough sunlight is lavished on this small sandy
waste to satisfy perpetually the power needs of the entire population of the
United States at the present rate of power consumption. In fact, grimy
miners digging six thousand tons of coal from the gloomy depths of the
earth obtain only an amount of energy equivalent to that swallowed on a
sunny day by a single square mile of land or sea.

Almost every material problem of living turns out in the last analysis
to be a problem of the control of energy. The householder, when he has

218

THE TAMING OF ENERGY 219

paid his bills for fuel and electricity, is likely to consider that he has taken
care of his energy requirements for the month, yet each bill from the gro-
cer or the milliner is quite as truly a bill for energy. We do not buy a bas-
ket of strawberries for the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms they con-
tain, but for the energy stored by these atoms when they join together in
molecules to form sugars, starches, flavors, and vitamines. That part of the
cost of a lady's hat which does not represent business acumen on the part
of the milliner is for stored and directed energy — the atoms of matter of
which the hat is composed are permanent, and will still exist when the hat
has been discarded and burned. Only energy and knowledge of how to
apply it are needed to re-create a hat from its smoke and ashes!

Even such materials as gold, silver, and copper represent true wealth
only as they represent the energy required to find, collect, and purify these
metals. Our supply of matter on earth is not changing appreciably, for
although a little hydrogen and helium leak off from the top of the atmos-
phere, far more matter than we lose in this way is brought to the earth by
meteorites. Iron may rust or be scattered, but it cannot be lost so long as
sufficient energy remains to reconcentrate and re-refine it. Many a mine
long abandoned as worthless has brought in a fortune when cheaper power
or a more efficient concentrating process has made worth while the recov-
ery of further metal from its scrap-heap. Only energy is needed to gather
as much of every material as we may need from the air, the land, or the
sea.

Energy is wealth, and in the case of apprenticed sunlight, wealth of a
particularly desirable kind, for it is freshly created and does not involve
robbing the poor, taxing the rich, or despoiling the earth of materials which
may be needed by our descendants as much as by ourselves. Yet this energy
is free — to him who can discover how to capture and control it.

The scientist who is most concerned with the investigation and control
of energy is the physicist. In his researches on energy the physicist works
very closely with the chemist, who is interested primarily in matter. Matter
and energy are always closely related; and physics and chemistry, orig-
inally a single science called natural philosophy, can never be separated
completely, for they are the twin sciences which deal with the fundamental
structure of our physical universe.

The chemist gathers the minerals and fibers and oils which he finds in
nature, reduces them to the elementary atoms of which they are composed,
and then causes these atoms to recombine into thousands of new kinds of

220 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

molecules, thus forming new perfumes and dyes, new flavors and fabrics
and drugs.

The physicist, however, takes apart the very atoms themselves, sending
through wires the electrons which he thus collects, and operating with
them his telephones and X-ray tubes and television outfits. Or he may
induce the atoms to emit light rays of strange new colors, rays which he
bends with lenses cleverly designed to enable him to discern objects which
are too dark or small or transparent otherwise to be seen.

As the physicist has gradually learned to control the grosser forms of
energy such as heat and sound, he has been led to probe deeper and deeper
into nature in studying the behavior of energy in its finer and more subtle
forms, such as light and electricity and magnetism. He has now succeeded
in penetrating down through the atom into its tiny nucleus or core, and
one of his principal interests at the moment (though by no means the only
one, nor necessarily the most important one) is to take sample atom cores
apart to see what they are made of and how they are put together. The
atom is being taken to pieces quite literally, for when one of the modern
"atom-smashing" devices is put into operation the atomic debris comes
flying out like dirt from a gopher hole in which a very industrious puppy
is scratching.

The scientist who appears preoccupied with the center of the atom is
burrowing after the key to the structure of matter and energy, not because
he expects to tap the energy in the atom, but because he knows that before
nature can be controlled she must be understood. The physicist who is
engaged in "pure" or fundamental research is attempting to understand
nature. The applied physicist is attempting to control nature. The two
kinds of investigators try to keep in close collaboration, but physics is a vast
science which ranges from such theoretical subjects as Relativity to such
practical applications as the phonograph, as the interests of its workers
have ranged from those of Einstein to those of Edison.

. . . "Atom smashing" (using the term broadly to cover fundamental
research into the structure of matter and energy) pays astonishing divi-
dends— not a mere five per cent, nor one hundred per cent, but hundiyds
of times the original investment. This is not fanciful romanticism, but
stark bookkeeping which realistic corporations, headed by typical American
business men, have many times demonstrated to their stockholders.

The scientist, like the artist, creates something new merely by rearrange-
ment of the old. An industry that gets its profits from digging coal or
pumping oil or felling timber is constantly depleting its resources. An
industry that rests on a physical discovery gets its profits through fresh
creation.

THE TAMING OF ENERGY 221

Since wealth consists ultimately of the control of matter and energy, the
wealth level of mankind slowly rises as science learns to capture a con-
stantly growing fraction of the energy that is available and turn it more
effectively to useful ends. A factory worker in the United States is paid
several times as much in real wages as his predecessor received a generation
ago. While management may justly claim credit for this improvement, it
was made possible only by utilizing technological achievements resting on
scientific discoveries, which made the labor of each worker more produc-
tive. For the wages he received for one hour of labor in the middle 1930*5
a factory worker in Italy could buy a certain amount of food, a similar
worker in Great Britain could buy twice as much, but a worker in the
United States could buy four times as much. Economists agree that tech-
nological development and scientific discovery have been responsible for
this higher level of plenty in the United States. Science is a great agency
for social betterment, for the victories over nature which result from its
application make possible increased wages and profits and reduced prices
at the same time.

Experience has shown no better way of eliminating poverty than by well-
directed "atom smashing." Poverty can best be abolished by replacing it
with wealth; and the systematic investigation of matter and energy without
regard to immediate practical ends has turned out to be the most direct
road to social riches. In the long run digging for truth has always proved
not only more interesting, but more profitable, than digging for gold. If
urged on by the love of digging, one digs deeper than if searching for some
particular nugget. Practicality is inevitably short-sighted, and is self-handi-
capped by the fact that it is looking so hard for some single objective that
it may miss much that nature presents to one who is purposefully digging
for whatever may turn up.

Each dweller in the United States is now served, on the average, by
energy equivalent to that which could be provided by thirty slaves such as
sweated at the command of an ancient Egyptian king. In making this
much energy available, science has contributed only a small fraction of
what it can contribute. Human beings can be made at least twenty thou-
sand times as wealthy as they are today; but only the fundamental inves-
tigation of nature, such as is involved in "atom smashing," will show how.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed (except as it can be changed
into matter under certain extreme conditions, and produced from
matter), but it can appear in any of a dozen or more forms. If the physicist
succeeds in backing a bit of energy into a corner, so to speak, he usually

222 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

expects il to disappear like a witch in a fairy tale, and to reappear in an
entirely different form. By careful study of many typical situations he has
learned where to lie in wait for the reappearance of the energy so that he
can pounce on it in its new guise, or, if it stay hidden, ferret out its place
of concealment. All of our most useful machines, such as electric motors
and kitchen ranges and cameras, are merely clever devices for beguiling
energy of one form into changing itself into another form which we desire
to use. By touching a match to a gallon of gasoline we can cause the
chemical energy which the gasoline contains to be transformed into thermal
energy; but if instead we use a spark plug in an automobile cylinder, much
of the thermal energy, when it appears, will find itself harnessed to perform
mechanical work.

The most useful forms of energy for practical purposes are those we call
heat, sound, and light, and the mechanical, electrical, magnetic, chemical,
and gravitational forms. When we have learned how to convert energy
from any one of these forms directly into any other at will, without letting
much energy escape in the process, the millennium will have arrived so
far as the cost of living is concerned.

If, for example, we knew how to convert electrical energy directly into
light, the problem of "cold light" would be solved. At present we must use
indirect means, as in the incandescent lamp, where electrical energy is
forced to heat a tungsten filament and thus is turned into heat energy.
When heat has set the filament glowing some of its energy is transformed
into useful light as a by-product, but nine-tenths of the energy is wasted as
invisible radiation, boosting our electric light bills to ten times what they
should be.

An example of the many useful applications which often result from the
discovery of a new way of transforming one form of energy into another
is given by the piezo-electric crystal. The brothers Pierre and Paul Curie
found in 1880 that sensitive crystals of certain types, such as quartz and
Rochelle salt, shrink and swell when given electric shocks. Thus was dis-
covered a new method of changing electrical energy into mechanical
energy. The crystals were found also to generate electric charges on their
surfaces when squeezed or stretched, so they could be used to convert
mechanical energy back into the electrical form as well. The Curie brothers
were academic physicists, interested chiefly in digging out facts (Pierre,
with his wife Marie, later discovered radium), so they made no use of their
discovery. It lay unapplied until 1917, when, during the World War,
another physicist decided that crystals might be useful for detecting the
sound waves given out by submarines. His work was so successful that it
suggested further fields for investigation, and later we shall find piezo-

THE TAMING OF ENERGY 223

electric crystals being used for such diverse purposes as keeping radio
broadcasting stations tuned to the proper frequency, serving as micro-
phones for changing sound waves into electrical waves, and forming
wave-filters which keep separate more than two hundred telephone conver-
sations passing simultaneously over the same pair of wires. These accom-
plished crystals also make excellent phonograph pickups, can be used as
telephone transmitters and receivers, and operate the most accurate clocks
in the world, which tick 100,000 times a second. Again, by tickling such
crystals electrically at high frequency they can be made to emit super-
sounds, which are of value for cracking crude oil to increase its yield of
gasoline, for precipitating smoke, for detecting icebergs or other obstruc-
tions at sea, and even for speeding up the pickling of cucumbers I

The delay of thirty-seven years in putting the piezo-electric crystal to
work occurred because good methods of applying rapid electric shocks to
the crystal were not available until the electronic vacuum tube was in-
vented, which in turn waited on the discovery of the electron. Thus the
application of one important discovery is often forced to await the birth
of another.

Man's physical developments involve special transformations of energy
from one form to another — as in telephony, where sound vibrations are
changed into electrical vibrations, carried through space on waves or over
wires, and then changed back into sound vibrations; or in television, where
the same is done for visual images. But fundamental to all such processes
is the transportation and storage of energy in bulk.

Transporting energy from place to place keeps millions of men busy.
Most energy is transported in one of three ways : in coal carried by ships
or freight cars; in oil carried by ships, tank cars, or pumped through pipe
lines; or sent over wires as electrical power. More than half our energy is
carried in coal. Electrical power is more convenient to use than any other
kind, but even when energy is ultimately to be delivered in electrical form
it is cheapest at present to carry it locked in coal or oil for as much of its
journey as possible.

In the United States there are 110,000 miles of pipes through which black
oil flows, sometimes for more than a thousand miles on a single journey;
65,000 additional miles of pipe carry natural gas for fuel; and together
these buried pipe lines form a transportation system almost three-quarters
as long as all the railroad tracks of the country. About half as much energy
as is carried by oil and gas flows through wires, carried by electric currents

224 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

consisting of countless electrons sent swinging Irom one copper atom to
the next.

To carry energy to its user costs much more than to dig it out of the
ground as coal or to scoop it up with turbine blades from a waterfall.
Though a ton of coal costs less than four dollars at the mine, delivered to
the ultimate user it may cost four times as much. Electrical energy delivered
in the home now costs on the average five and a half cents a kilowatt hour,
more than ten times its cost to produce in wholesale lots at a steam plant
near a coal mine. There is great need for development of cheaper electrical
methods of transmitting power. Standard engineering methods are begin-
ning to be found insufficient — new methods must be provided by applying
physics anew.

At present electric power cannot be piped economically farther than a
few hundred miles unless expensive special equipment is used; only when
a tremendous load of power can be sold is it economical to provide this
equipment. The electrical engineer delivering his kilowatts is in much the
situation of a small boy carrying home sugar from the grocery store in a
paper sack with a hole in its bottom which lets the sugar trickle slowly
away. Since the engineer cannot now afford to plug the hole, only those
persons can afford to buy electrical sugar whose homes are within a few
hundred miles of an electrical power store.

It has long been known that the most efficient way to send power over
wires of a given size is to keep the flow of electric current as low as possible,
and make the voltage, or electrical pressure of the line, as great as possible,
Engineers have a working rule which says that a power line should be
operated at such a high voltage that 1000 volts-is provided for each mile the
power is carried. Since 350,000 volts is about the economical upper limit
of voltage practical on present power lines, this sets a 350-mile limit:

In 1941 the longest power line stretched 270 miles from Boulder Dam to
Los Angeles. To carry energy from such great water-power developments
as Tennessee Valley to the large cities where power is most needed,
methods of using higher voltages must "be provided. But raising the voltage
of a standard power line above 350,000 volts may cause the bottom to drop
out of the electrical sugar bag — the air, the line, and the insulators refuse to
co-operate longer in keeping the electrical flow intact.

Long-distance transmission lines now operate with alternating current,
briefly written A.C. Electricity is first pushed into one wire of* the line and
pulled from the other, and then the push and pull are reversed. Pushes
and pulls are usually alternated 120 times in a second, giving 6o-cycle A.C.
Power can also be transmitted with direct current (D.-C.) by pumping
electrons continuously into one wire*and out of the other, and it* is known

THE TAMING OF ENERGY 225

that with such D.C. transmission much less electricity leaks from a line
than with A.C. Short lines operating at more than a million volts D.C.
have been used experimentally to carry power. However, the transformers
which give the most convenient means of stepping electricity up from a
low voltage to a high voltage, or stepping it down again, operate only
with alternating current. For safety, power must be generated and used
at low voltages; yet for economy it must be sent over a long line at high
voltage. This combination of necessities sets a pretty dilemma.

Here the electronic vacuum tube enters the picture; and with its aid the
problem may well be solved. With tubes of one type direct current can be
changed to alternating current at any voltage. By using tubes of a second
type alternating current can be changed to direct. Such tubes should make
it possible to generate alternating current power, step this up to high
voltage with transformers, change the power to D.C. with a vacuum tube
and send it over the long-distance power line, at the far end change it back
to A.C. with another vacuum tube, and then step it down with a trans-
former to the desired voltage for use. This process of sidestepping nature's
obstacles, which might be described in football terms as a double lateral
pass with a forward pass between, sounds complex, but actually it is simple
once the vacuum tubes have been put into reliable working order.. A trial
installation of this sort has been kept in satisfactory operation by the
General Electric Company in Schenectady for several years.

An entirely different attack on the problem of high-voltage D.C. power
transmission has been suggested by the work of an atom-smashing
physicist, Dr. Robert J. Van de Graaff, and his collaborators. They were
interested, not so much in developing a new means of transmitting power,
as in perfecting a high-voltage machine which would generate 5,000,000
volts with which to hurl electrical bullets against the cores of atoms which
were to be smashed. In Van de Graaff's generator, electrons are sprayed
against wide rubber belts. To these belts the electrons stick, and by them
are carried up into a large metal sphere, which they gradually charge with
electricity. The sphere is carefully insulated from the ground by a sup-
porting column thirty feet high, and so smooth and round is this sphere
that electricity can leak into the air from it but slowly. If electrons are
pumped indefinitely into the sphere its electrical pressure rises until finally
a voltage is reached which the air can resist no longer, and a great flash of
artificial lightning jumps between the sphere and any near-by object con-
nected to the ground. With -such a generator several million volts might
be applied directly to a power line, no transformers would be needed at the
beginning of the line, and extremely weak direct currents would suffice
to transmit large amounts of power with little loss.

226 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Scientists have envisaged long D.C. lines consisting of a pipe, buried in
the earth with a wire stretched down its center, carrying power from great
hydraulic turbo-generators, or from steam plants located near coal mines,
to any city in the country. The pipe might be filled with carbon tetra-
chloride vapor, or with the Freon vapor used in refrigerators, to reduce
leakage of electricity between the wire and the pipe. It has even been sug-
gested that the pipe might be evacuated over its whole length of more than
a thousand miles, for electricity cannot leak across a well-evacuated space.
To obtain a suitable vacuum thousands of high-speed pumps would have
to be kept sucking on the pipe like piglets on a myriad-breasted mother
pig. At present such a project is perhaps visionary, but it illustrates how
the practicability of an engineering scheme may hinge on new develop-
ments of physics — in this case, on a high-voltage generator and a more
efficient vacuum pump.

Must wires always be used to carry electric power from place to place,
or could rays be used instead? Dreamers have long talked of powerful
rays which could be focused on distant machinery to which energy was
thus supplied. Keeping airplanes aloft without fuel is a favorite applica-
tion. At present no rays energetic enough for this purpose and at the same
time available in quantity are known to scientists. Radio waves and light
waves are more suited to such comparatively dainty tasks as carrying
messages than to feeding engines with power. Machinery can be operated
with the energy contained in rays of sunlight, to be sure, but the power
these carry is insufficiently concentrated to be worth using at present, even
when available. Rays of more concentrated types have either insufficient
penetrating power to travel far through the air, or are uncontrollable, or
are available only in very small quantities. Energy can be most readil)
controlled by giving it matter to cling to when it is to be stored, concen-
trated, or carried from place to place with little loss.

To store energy for future use is much more difficult than to release
energy already stored in matter. When fuel is burned, the chemical energy
stored in it is released as heat energy; but the reverse process— unburning
a gallon of gasoline or a cord of wood — is very slow and difficult. Nature
unburns wood when she uses sunlight in plants to release carbon atoms
from the carbon dioxide molecules which the leaf has picked up, wafted
through the air from some long-forgotten fire. Man has not yet learned to
imitate nature in this regard, though he is beginning to get some clues as
to how the job is done.

One can store energy mechanically, as by winding a clock or bending a

THE TAMING OF ENERGY 227

bow; electrically, as by charging a condenser; gravitationally, as by pump-
ing water into a high reservoir; thermally, as in a hot water bottle; chem-
ically, as by charging a storage battery or growing a tree; and in many
other ways. All involve associating energy with matter.

In comparing storage processes a most important question is, How much
energy can be packed into each pound of matter? We can get an idea of
the energy-holding capacity of matter by seeing how much energy can be
released from a pound of each of a number of fuels; this energy can readily
be evaluated in terms of how long a pound of the fuel would keep a
6o-watt incandescent lamp burning if all its energy were converted into
electric power. Thus, a pound of wood would keep the lamp alight for
about 200 hours, a pound of coal for twice as long, a pound of gasoline
for 900 hours. Hydrogen is one of the best energy-storing substances obtain-
able, for in a pound of this gas is stored enough energy to keep the lamp
bright for nearly 2700 hours.

Any method of producing such fuels is a method of storing energy in
chemical form; and chemical storage, in which the energy is tucked
between atoms when these are grouped together to form molecules, appears
to be the best of any practical method now available to store energy with
little weight. Even fuels are heavier energy-storage reservoirs than we
would like, however; witness the concern of the aviator whose two tons
of gasoline must carry him across the Atlantic Ocean.

Any youth who wishes to win fame and fortune through scientific
discovery, but who cannot think of anything which needs discovering,
would do well to turn his attention to the problem of storing energy lightly.
If he could invent a device into which electrical energy could be fed, which
would store this energy chemically and later release it again as electrical
energy, his fortune might be made — if the device was light enough. Such a
device is, of course, merely a storage battery; but all present storage bat-
teries, though extremely efficient, are far too heavy to be used for anything
but odd jobs such as starting automobiles. One pound of ordinary lead
storage battery, when fully charged, holds less than one-twentieth as much
energy as is contained in a pound of gasoline.

If a storage battery weighing less than one-tenth as much as present bat-
teries were to become available, the electric automobile would probably
supersede the gasoline motor car almost immediately. What magic does
the heavy lead atom, now used for almost all storage of electrical energy,
possess which enables it to store energy and give this out again at the will
of the user, which is not possessed by, say, the lithium or the beryllium
atoms, weighing one-thirtieth as much ? There seems to be no reason for
supposing that a light storage battery cannot be invented, except that many

228 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

people have tried doing this, and no one has yet succeeded. Such argu-
ments have, of course, never deterred resourceful men. To invent a light
battery, the old method was to start by trying thousands of different light
materials; the new method is carefully to study nature and find how she
packs energy into atoms and molecules.

Edition of

Space, Time and Einstein*

PAUL R. HEYL

WHETHER WE UNDERSTAND IT OR NOT, WE HAVE
all heard of the Einstein theory, and failure to understand it does
not seem incompatible with the holding of opinions on the subject, some-
times of a militant and antagonistic character.

Twenty-four years have elapsed since Einstein published his first paper
on relativity, dealing principally with certain relations between mechanics
and optics. Since that time a new generation has grown up to whom pre-
Einstein science is a matter of history, not of experience. Eleven years
after his first paper Einstein published a second, in which he broadened
and extended the theory laid down in the first so as to include gravitation.
And now again, thirteen years later, in a third paper, Einstein has
broadened his theory still farther so as to include the phenomena of
electricity and magnetism,

In view of the rekindling of interest in Einstein because of the appear-
ance of his latest paper it may be worth while to reexamine and restate
the primary foundations upon which his theory rests.

The general interest taken in this subject is frequendy a matter of
wonder to those of us who must give it attention professionally, for there

* Publication approved by the Director of the Bureau of Standards of the U. S. Depart-
ment of Commerce.

SPACE, TIME AND EINSTEIN 229

are in modern physical science other doctrines which run closely second
to that of Einstein in strangeness and novelty, yet none o£ these seems to
have taken any particular hold on popular imagination.

Perhaps the reason for this is that these theories deal with ideas which
are remote from ordinary life, while Einstein lays iconoclastic hands on
two concepts about which every intelligent person believes that he really
knows something — space and time.

Space and time have been regarded "always, everywhere and by all,"
as independent concepts, sharply distinguishable from one another, with
no correlation between them. Space is fixed, though we may move about
in it at will, forward or backward, up or down; and wherever we go our
experience is that the properties of space are everywhere the same, and
are unaltered whether we are moving or stationary. Time, on the other
hand, is essentially a moving proposition, and we must perforce move
with it. Except in memory, we can not go back in time; we must go
forward, and at the rate at which time chooses to travel. We are on a
moving platform, the mechanism of which is beyond our control.

There is a difference also in our measures of space and time. Space may
be measured in feet, square feet or cubic feet, as the case may be, but time
is essentially one-dimensional. Square hours or cubic seconds are mean-
ingless terms. Moreover, no connection has ever been recognized between
space and time measures. How many feet make one hour? A meaningless
question, you say, yet something that sounds very much like it has (since
Minkowski) received the serious attention of many otherwise reputable
scientific men. And now comes Einstein, rudely disturbing these old-
established concepts and asking us to recast our ideas of space and time
in a way that seems to us fantastic and bizarre.

What has Einstein done to these fundamental concepts?

He has introduced a correlation or connecting link between what have
always been supposed to be separate and distinct ideas. In the first place,
he asserts that as we move about, the geometrical properties of space, as
evidenced by figures drawn in it, will alter by an amount depending on
the speed of the observer's motion, thus (through the concept of velocity)
linking space with time. He also asserts in the second place that the flow
of time, always regarded as invariable, will likewise alter with the motion
of the observer, again linking time with space.

For example, suppose that we, with our instruments for measuring
space and time, are located on a platform which we believe to be station-
ary. We can not be altogether certain of this, for there is no other visible
object in the universe save another similar platform carrying an observer
likewise equipped : but when we observe relative motion between our plat-

230 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

form and the other it pleases our intuition to suppose our platform at
rest and to ascribe all the motion to the other.

Einstein asserts that if this relative velocity were great enough we might
notice some strange happenings on the other platform. True, a rather
high velocity would be necessary, something comparable with the speed
of light, say 100,000 miles a second; and it is tacitly assumed that we
would be able to get a glimpse of the moving system as it flashed by.
Granting this, what would we see?

Einstein asserts that if there were a circle painted on the moving plat-
form it would appear to us as an ellipse with its short diameter in the
direction of its motion. The amount of this shortening would depend
upon the speed with which the system is moving, being quite imper-
ceptible at ordinary speeds. In the limit, as the speed approached that of
light, the circle would flatten completely into a straight line — its diameter
perpendicular to the direction of motion.

Of this shortening, says Einstein, the moving observer will be uncon-
scious, for not only is the circle flattened in the direction of motion, but
the platform itself and all it carries (including the observer) share in
this shortening. Even the observer's measuring rod is not exempt. Laid
along that diameter of the circle which is perpendicular to the line of
motion it would indicate, say, ten centimeters; placed along the shortened
diameter, the rod, being itself now shortened in the same ratio, would
apparently indicate the same length as before, and the moving observer
would have no suspicion of what we might be seeing. In fact, he might
with equal right suppose himself stationary and lay all the motion to the
account of our platform. And if we had a circle painted on our floor it
would appear flattened to him, though not to us.

Again, the clock on the other observer's platform would exhibit to us,
though not to him, an equally eccentric behavior. Suppose that other
platform stopped opposite us long enough for a comparison of clocks, and
then, backing off to get a start, flashed by us at a high speed. As it passed
we would see that the other clock was apparently slow as compared with
ours, but of this the moving observer would be unconscious.

But could he not observe our clock ?

Certainly, just as easily as we could see his.

And would he not see that our clock was now faster than his? "No,"
says Einstein. "On the contrary, he would take it to be slower."

Here is a paradox indeed! A's clock appears slow to B while at the
same time B's clock appears slow to A\ Which is right?

To this question Einstein answers indifferently:

"Either. It all depends on the point of view."

SPACE, TIME AND EINSTEIN 231

In asserting that the rate of a moving clock is altered by its motion
Einstein has not in mind anything so materialistic as the motion inter-
fering with the proper functioning of the pendulum or balance wheel.
It is something deeper and more abstruse than that. He means that the
flow of time itself is changed by the motion of the system, and that the
clock is but fulfilling its natural function in keeping pace with the altered
rate of time.

A rather imperfect illustration may help at this point. If I were traveling
by train from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast it would be necessary for
me to set my watch back an hour occasionally. A less practical but
mathematically more elegant plan would be to alter the rate of my watch
before starting so that it would indicate the correct local time during the
whole journey. Of course, on a slow train less alteration would be
required. The point is this: that a timepiece keeping local time on the
train will of necessity run at a rate depending on the speed of the train.

Einstein applies a somewhat similar concept to all moving systems,
and asserts that the local time on such systems runs the more slowly the
more rapidly the system moves.

It is no wonder that assertions so revolutionary should encounter general
incredulity. Skepticism is nature's armor against foolishness. But there
are two reactions possible to assertions such as these. One may say: "The
man is crazy" or one may ask: "What is the evidence?"

The latter, of course, is the correct scientific attitude. To such a question
Einstein might answer laconically: "Desperate diseases require desperate
remedies."

"But," we reply, "we are not conscious of any disease so desperate as
to require such drastic treatment."

"If you are not," says Einstein, "you should be. Does your memory run
back thirty years? Or have you not read, at least, of the serious contra-
diction in which theoretical physics found itself involved at the opening
of the present century?"

Einstein's reference is to the difficulty which arose as a consequence of
the negative results of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment and
other experiments of a similar nature. The situation that then arose is
perhaps best explained by an analogy.

If we were in a boat, stationary in still water, with trains of water-
waves passing us, it would be possible to determine the speed of the
waves by timing their passage over, say, the length of the boat. If the
boat were then set in motion in the same direction in which the waves
were traveling, the apparent speed of the waves with respect to the boat
would be decreased, reaching zero when the boat attained the speed of

232 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

the waves; and if the boat were set in motion in the opposite direction
the apparent speed of the waves would be increased.

If the boat were moving with uniform speed in a circular path, the
apparent speed of the waves would fluctuate periodically, and from the
magnitude of this fluctuation it would be possible to determine the speed
of the boat.

Now the earth is moving around the sun in a nearly circular orbit with
a speed of about eighteen miles per second, and at all points in this orbit
light waves from the stars are constantly streaming by. The analogy of
the boat and the water-waves suggested to several physicists, toward the
close of the nineteenth century, the possibility of verifying the earth's
motion by experiments on the speed of light.

True, the speed of the earth in its orbit is only one ten-thousandth of
the speed of light, but methods were available of more than sufficient
precision to pick up an effect of this order of magnitude. It was, there-
fore, with the greatest surprise, not to say consternation, that the results
of all such experiments were found to be negative; that analogy, for
some unexplained reason, appeared to have broken down somewhere
between mechanics and optics; that while the speed of water-waves varied
as it should with the speed of the observer, the velocity of light seemed
completely unaffected by such motion.

Nor could any fault be found with method or technique. At least three
independent lines of experiment, two optical and one electrical, led to the
same negative conclusion.

This breakdown of analogy between mechanics and optics introduced
a sharp line of division into physical science. Now since the days of
Newton the general trend of scientific thought has been in the direction
of removing or effacing such sharp lines indicating differences in kind
and replacing them by differences in degree. In other words, scientific
thought is monistic, seeking one ultimate explanation for all phenomena.

Kepler, by his study of the planets, had discovered the three well-known
laws which their motion obeys. To him these laws were purely empirical,
separate and distinct results of observation. It remained for Newton to
show that these three laws were mathematical consequences of a single
broader law — that of gravitation. In this, Newton was a monistic
philosopher.

The whole of the scientific development of the nineteenth century was
monistic. Faraday and Oersted showed that electricity and magnetism
were closely allied. Joule, Mayer and others pointed out the equivalence
of heat and work. Maxwell correlated light with electricity and mag-
netism. By the close of the century physical phenomena of all kinds were

SPACE, TIME AND EINSTEIN 233

regarded as forming one vast, interrelated web, governed by some broad
and far-reaching law as yet unknown, but whose discovery was confi-
dently expected, perhaps in the near future. Gravitation alone obstinately
resisted all attempts to coordinate it with othtx phenomena.

The consequent reintroduction of a sharp line between mechanics and
optics was therefore most disturbing. It was to remove this difficulty
that Einstein found it necessary to alter our fundamental ideas regarding
space and time. It is obvious that a varying velocity can be made to appear
constant if our space and time units vary also in a proper manner, but
in introducing such changes we must be careful not to cover up the
changes in velocity readily observable in water-waves or sound waves.

The determination of such changes in length and time units is a purely
mathematical problem. The solution found by Einstein is what is known
as the Lorentz transformation, so named because it was first found (in
a simpler form) by Lorentz. Einstein arrived at a more general formula
and, in addition, was not aware of Lorentz's work at the time of writing
his own paper.

The evidence submitted so far for Einstein's theory is purely retrospec-
tive; the theory explains known facts and removes difficulties. But it must
be remembered that this is just what the theory was built to do. It is a
different matter when we apply it to facts unknown at the time the
theory was constructed, and the supreme test is the ability of a theory to
predict such new phenomena.

This crucial test had been successfully met by the theory of relativity.
In 1916 Einstein broadened his theory to include gravitation, which since
the days of Newton had successfully resisted all attempts to bring it into
line with other phenomena. From this extended theory Einstein predicted
two previously unsuspected phenomena, a bending of light rays passing
close by the sun and a shift of the Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum.
Both these predictions have now been experimentally verified.

Mathematically, Einstein's solution of our theoretical difficulties is
perfect. Even the paradox of the two clocks, each appearing slower than
the other, becomes a logical consequence of the Lorentz transformation.
Einstein's explanation is sufficient, and up to the present time no one has
been able to show that it is not necessary.

Einstein himself is under no delusion on this point. He is reported to
have said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a
single experiment may at any time prove me wrong."

Early in the present year Einstein again broadened his theory to include
the phenomena of electricity and magnetism. This does not mean that
he has given an electromagnetic explanation of gravitation; many attempts

234 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

of this kind have been made, and all have failed in the same respect — to
recognize that there is no screen for gravitation. What Einstein has done
is something deeper and broader than that. He has succeeded in finding
a formula which may assume two special forms according as a constant
which it contains is or is not zero. In the latter case the formula gives
us Maxwell's equations for an electromagnetic field; in the former,
Einstein's equations for a gravitative field. . . .

Einstein's aim from the first has been to bring order, not confusion;
to exhibit all the laws of nature as special cases of one all-embracing
law. In his monism he is unimpeachably orthodox.

But there are other monistic philosophers besides scientific men. You
will recall Tennyson's vision of

One law, one element,

And one far-off, divine event

To which the whole creation moves.

1929

The Foundations of Chemical Industry

ROBERT E. ROSE

PRELUDE: THE JUGGLERS

AJL OF US HAVE SEEN THE JUGGLER WHO ENTERTAINS
by throwing one brightly colored ball after the other into the air,
catching each in turn and throwing it up again until he has quite a
number moving from hand to hand. The system which he keeps in motion
has an orderly structure. He changes it by selecting balls of different colors,
altering the course or the sequence of the balls, or by adding to or
diminishing the number with which he plays.

With this figure in mind let us use our imaginations. Before us we have
an assemblage of hundreds of thousands of jugglers varying in their
degree of accomplishment; some handle only one ball, others, more
proficient, keep several in motion, and there are still others of an as-
tounding dexterity who play with an hundred or more at once. The balls
they handle are of ninety different colors and sizes. The jugglers do not
keep still but move about at varying rates; those handling few and light
balls move more quickly than those handling many or heavier ones.
These dancers bump into each other and when they do so in certain
cases they exchange some of the balls which they are handling or one
juggler may take all of those handled by another, but in no case are the
balls allowed to drop.

THE VANISHING POINT

Now imagine the moving group to become smaller and smaller until
the jugglers cease to be visible to us, even when they dance under the
highest power microscope. If someone who had not seen them were to
come to you and say that he proposed undertaking the problem of finding
out how the balls were moving and what were the rules of the exchanges
made, and further that he proposed utilizing his knowledge to control
what each minute juggler was doing, you would tell him that his task was

235

236 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

hopeless. If the chemist had listened to such advice there would be
no chemical industry and you would lose so much that you would not be
living in the way you are.

The jugglers are the electromagnetic forces of matter, the balls are the
atoms, and each group in the hands of the juggler is a molecule of a
substance. In reality, of course, instead of each molecule being represented
by one unit we should multiply our jugglers by trillions and trillions.

THE MASTERY OF MOLECULES

The chemist, without even seeing them, has learned to handle these
least units of materials in such a way as to get the arrangements which
are more useful from those less useful. This power he has acquired as the
outcome of his life of research, his desire to understand, even though
understanding brought him no material gain, but mere knowledge.
Because of his patience and devotion he has built a number of industries;
all have this in common — they serve to rearrange atoms of molecules or
to collect molecules of one kind for the service of man.

THE GREAT QUEST

The study of the substances of the earth's crust, of the air over and of
the waters under earth, which has led us to our present knowledge of the
electron, atom, and molecule, has been more adventurous than many a
great journey made when the world was young and the frontier of the
unknown was not remote from the city walls. Into the unknown world
of things upon the "sea that ends not till the world's end" the man of
science ventured, and he came back laden with treasure greater than all
the gold and precious stones ever taken from the earth. He gave these to
others and he fared forth again without waving of flags, without the
benediction of holy church, with no more than the courage of him who
would win Nature, who had chosen a harder road than that of the great,
made famous because of subduing other men. He took no arms upon his
quest, scarcely enough food to keep body and soul together, but instead,
fire, glass, and that most astounding of all tools, the balance. As he pushed
farther and farther on his great venture and as more and more joined his
little band, he brought more and more back to those who did not under-
stand in the least what he was doing, until now the lives of all men
are made easier if not happier by these strange, most useful, and
most potent things of which he is the creator by reason of the under-
standing his journeys have given him — a power much greater than
any mere black magic.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 237

This is the story of some of the strange treasure found by him in the
far lands that are about us— treasure found by learning the secret of
the jugglers' dance— the dance of the least little things out of which all
we know is fashioned.

SULFURIC ACID

The Great Discovery

In Sicily and other parts of the earth where there are volcanoes, lumps
of a yellow crumbly "stone" are found, called brimstone (a corruption of
brcnnisteinn or burning stone). This material was regarded as having
curative properties; if it was burned in a house the bad odors of the
sickroom of primitive times were suppressed. Also the alchemists found
that it took away the metallic character of most metals and they con-
sidered it very important in their search for the philosopher's stone, the
talisman that was to turn all things to gold. The alchemists found also
that sulfur, when burned over water, caused the water to become acid, and
one of them found further that if the burning took place in the presence
of saltpeter the acid which was produced was much stronger; indeed, if
concentrated it was highly corrosive. A useless find, it seemed, of interest
only to the alchemist who hoped to become rich beyond the dreams of
avarice, and immortal as the gods. But the chemist made this discovery of
more importance to the condition of the human race than that of Colum-
bus, because by it he gave man a kingdom different from any that could
have been his by merely discovering what already existed upon earth.
That is the wonder of the chemist's work; he finds that which is not upon
the earth until he discovers it; just as the artist creates so does the chemist.
If he did not, there would be no chemical industry to write about.

Experiment to Manufacture

Having investigated this acid, he found it a most valuable new tool
with which many new and interesting things could be made, and much
could be done that before had been impossible. It became necessary, then,
if all men were to profit as the chemist always wishes them to do by his
power, that sulfuric acid should be made easily and cheaply in large
quantities. The first attempt at commercial manufacture was in 1740;
before that each experimenter made what little he needed for himself.
The process, that mentioned above, was carried out in large glass bal-
loons. It was a costly method and tedious. Then in 1746 lead chambers
were substituted for the glass and the industry progressed rapidly.

238 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

The whole object of this most basic of all chemical industries can be
written in three simple little equations.

Sulfur Oxygen Sulfur Dioxide

S + O2 = SO2

Sulfur Dioxide Oxygen Sulfur Trioxide

502 + O2 = SO3
Sulfur Trioxide Water Sulfuric Acid

503 + H20 = H2S04

Of the three elements necessary, oxygen occurs uncombined in the
air of which it forms one-fifth by volume; it is also present combined with
other elements in very large quantities in water, sand, and generally
throughout the earth's crust, which is nearly half oxygen in a com-
bined condition.

The Raw Materials

The great storehouse of hydrogen on the earth is water, of which it
forms one-ninth, by weight. Sulfur is not so widely distributed in large
quantities but it is very prevalent, being present in all plants and animals
and also in such compounds as Epsom salts, gypsum, and Glauber's salt.
In the free condition, i.e., as sulfur itself, it is found in volcanic regions
and also where bacteria have produced it by decomposing the products of
plant decay. There is one other source of sulfur that is quite important,
a compound with iron which contains so much sulfur that it will burn.

The problem then was to take these substances and from them group
the elements in such order as to produce sulfuric acid.

Since sulfur burns readily, that is, unites with oxygen to form sulfur
dioxide, one might expect it to take up one more atom of oxygen from the
air and become sulfur trioxide. It does, but so slowly that the process
would never suffice for commercial production. But there is a way of
speeding up the reaction which depends on using another molecule as a
go-between, thus making the oxygen more active. The principle is that
of the relay. Suppose an out-fielder has to throw a ball a very long way.
The chances are that the ball will not be very true and that it may fall
short of reaching the base. If there is a fielder between, he can catch the
ball and get it to the base with much greater energy.

The chemist uses as a go-between a catalyst (in one process), oxides of
nitrogen. Molecules of this gas throw an oxygen atom directly and un-
failingly into any sulfur dioxide molecule they meet, then equally cer-
tainly they seize the next oxygen atom that bumps into them and are
ready for the next sulfur dioxide molecule. Since molecules in a gas

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 239

mixture bump into each other roughly five billion times a second, there
is a very good chance for the exchange to take place in the great lead
chambers of approximately a capacity of 150,000 cubic feet into which are
poured water molecules (steam), oxygen molecules (air), and sulfur
dioxide, to which are added small quantities of the essential oxides o£
nitrogen.

The Acid Rain

A corrosive, sour drizzle falls to the floor and this is chamber acid.
It is sold in a concentration of 70 to 80 per cent. The weak chamber acid
is good enough for a great many industrial purposes and is very cheap.
If it is to be concentrated this must be done in vessels of lead up to a
certain concentration and then in platinum or gold-lined stills if stronger
acid is needed. Naturally this is expensive and every effort was made to
find a method of making strong sulfuric acid without the necessity of
this intermediate step. Especially was this true when the dyestuffs
industry began to demand very large quantities of tremendously strong
sulfuric acid which was not only 100 per cent but also contained a con-
siderable amount of sulfur trioxide dissolved in it (fuming sulfuric acid).

The difficulty was overcome by using another catalyst (platinum) in
the place of the oxides of nitrogen. If sulfur dioxide and oxygen (air)
are passed over the metal the two gases unite to form sulfur trioxide much
more rapidly and in the absence of water. Since platinum is very expensive
and its action depends on the surface exposed, it is spread on asbestos
fibers and does not look at all like the shiny metal of the jeweler. This
method is known as the contact process and the product is sulfur tri-
oxide, which represents the highest possible concentration of sulfuric acid
and can be led into ordinary oil of vitriol (98 per cent sulfuric acid) and
then diluted with water and brought to 98 per cent acid or left as fuming
acid, depending on the requirements of the case. The perfection of this
process was the result of some very painstaking research because when it
was tried at first it was found that the platinum soon lost its virtue as a
catalyst, and it was also discovered that the reason for this was the
presence of arsenic in the sulfur dioxide. To get rid of every trace of
arsenic is the hardest part of the contact process.

Vitriol

Next time you visit a laboratory ask to be shown a bottle of concen-
trated sulfuric acid. You will see a colorless, oily liquid, much heavier
than water, as you will notice if you lift the bottle. A little on your skin

240 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

will raise white weals and then dissolve your body right away; paper is
charred by it as by fire. When it touches water there is a hissing.

Sulfuric Acid and Civilization

A dreadful oil, but its importance to industry is astonishing. If the art
of making it were to be lost tomorrow we should be without steel and
all other metals and products of the metallurgical industry; railroads,
airplanes, automobiles, telephones, radios, reenforced concrete, all would
go because the metals are taken from the earth by using dynamite made
with sulfuric acid; and for the same reason construction work of all
kinds, road and bridge building, canals, tunnels, and sanitary construction
work would cease.

We should have to find other ways to produce purified gasoline and
lubricating oil. The textile industry would be crippled. We should find
ourselves without accumulators, tin cans, galvanized iron, radio outfits,
white paper, quick-acting phosphate fertilizers, celluloid, artificial leather,
dyestuflfs, a great many medicines, and numberless other things into the
making of which this acid enters at some stage.

If at some future date, however, all of our sulfur and all of our sulfur
ores are burned up the chemist will yet find ways of making sulfuric acid.
Possibly he may tap the enormous deposits of gypsum which exist in all
parts of the earth. This has been done to some extent already but is not
a process which is cheap enough to compete with sulfuric acid made
from sulfur.

NITRIC ACTD

It is essential that all the heavy chemicals, that is, the most used acids,
alkalies, and salts, should be made so far as possible from readily available
cheap material. We use air, water, and abundant minerals on this account.
Nitric acid caused the chemical industry much concern until it was found
possible to make it from air, because until then its source was Chile
saltpeter, or sodium nitrate, a mineral occurring in a quantity only in the
arid Chilean highlands. However, this source of supply is still the most
important and the process used is one of great interest.

Having made oil of vitriol, the chemist found that he could produce
other acids, one of the most important of these being liberated from salt-
peter by the action of sulfuric acid. When nitric acid is made in this
fashion we find that the sulfuric acid is changed into sodium sulfate and
remains behind in the still. One might think from this that sulfuric acid
is stronger and on that account that it drives out nitric acid, but in fact

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 241

this preparation depends on a very simple principle, one of great
importance.

Another Dance

We may best illustrate it by returning to our former simile. Let us
assume a sodium nitrate juggler moving rather slowly. He is bumped
into by a sulfuric acid juggler moving at about the same rate. They
exchange some of the atoms with which they are playing and in conse-
quence one juggler holds sodium hydrogen sulfate while the other holds
nitric acid.

NaN03 + H2S04 -» NaHSO4 + HNO3

The nitric acid molecule does not slow down the juggler as much as
the sodium hydrogen sulfate and therefore this particular dancer moves
away quite fast. Suppose millions of these exchanges to be taking place;
then the nitric acid molecules will continue to dance away and will not
come back to exchange their atoms any more. If we keep them all in by
putting a lid on, then they are forced to go back and we get no more
than a sort of game of ball in which the hydrogen and sodium atoms are
passed back and forth. If, on the other hand, we open the lid and put a
fire under the pot, the nitric acid molecules move faster and sooner or
later all of them are driven out.

Nitric acid is now made from the air in more than one way so that
we are entirely independent of the beds of Chile saltpeter no matter what
might happen to them. Without nitric acid we could not make gun-
cotton, dynamite, TNT, picric acid, ammonium nitrate, and the other
explosives which are so enormously important to our civilization. In addi-
tion, we would lose all our brilliant dyes and most of our artificial silk,
from which it is easy to see that this substance is of great importance to
all of us.

SALT, THE JEWEL BOX

Soda

Among the treasures to which man fell heir as the most important
inhabitant of the earth was one of innumerable little cubes made of
sodium and chloride, crystals of salt. These he noticed whenever seawater
evaporated and he soon found, if he lived on a vegetable diet as he did in
some places, that the addition of these to his food made it much more
pleasant and savory. It fact, it is a necessity for the health of the human
body, Hunting peoples do not use it so much because they live almost

242 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

entirely on meat, which contains sufficient salt. Next it was found that
salt could be employed for preserving fish and meat, and thus man was
able to tide over the periods in which hunting was poor. For ages and
ages it was put to no other use. Nobody but a chemist would have thought
of doing anything with it. In order to understand the whole of what he
did and the part which salt plays in industry owing to the chemist's
activity we must go back a little.

Soap as a Hair Dye

Very early it was found that the ashes of a fire (and fires at that time
were always made of wood) were useful in removing grease from the
hands. They were the earliest form of soap and it is surprising how long
they remained the only thing used. Our records go to show that the
Romans were the first of the more civilized peoples to find out how to
make real soap, and they learned it from the Gauls, who used the ma-
terial which they made from wood ashes and goat's tallow for washing
their hair and beards because they believed that this gave them the
fiery red appearance which they thought was becoming. The Romans
saw the advantage of soap over wood ashes and a very considerable trade
in the making of various kinds of soaps arose, but the difficulty always
was with the production of the ashes because it takes quite a lot of ashes
to make even a small quantity of soap. The advantage of having some-
thing more abundant to take the place of the ashes was evident. But
the real stimulus which led to the discovery of soda ash came from a
different source.

Glass from Ashes and Sand

It was found that ashes heated with sand formed glass. It was also
found that the ashes of marine plants, or plants occurring on the seashore,
gave a much better glass than that which could be made from the ashes
of land plants. In consequence of this, as the art of glass making grew,
barilla, the ashes of a plant growing in the salt marshes of Spain, became
an increasingly important article of commerce and upon it depended the
great glass factories of France and Bohemia. Owing to the political
situation which arose at the end of the eighteenth century, France found
herself in danger of losing her supremacy in the art of making glass
because England cut off her supply of the Spanish ashes. For some reason
the French ruler at the time had vision enough to see that it might
be possible to make barilla artificially from some source within the
kingdom of France and he offered a prize to any one who would make
his country independent of Spain. We have seen that the chemist's busi-

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 243

ness is the transmutation of one kind of material into another, and
naturally it was the chemist who came forward with a solution of the
problem. Since this process is now supplanted by a more economical one,
we will merely outline it here.

Limestone to Washing Soda

Remember that it is essential to start from some abundant common
material. Le Blanc, the chemist who solved the problem, knew that the
Spanish ashes contained sodium carbonate, the formula of which we
write as Na2COs; that is, it is a combination of sodium, carbon, and
oxygen. There are a great many carbonates in nature and among these
is that of calcium which we know as chalk, limestone, or marble, depend-
ing on the way in which it crystallizes. In this we have a substance of the
formula CaCOa. Suppose, then, we write the two compounds side by side:
Na2COa, CaCOa. Evidently the only difference is that in one we have two
atoms of sodium (Na2) in place of one of calcium (Ca) in the other.
Salt contains sodium and is very common. If, then, we can get the sodium
radical from the sodium chloride and the carbonate radical from the
limestone and join the two pieces we will get sodium carbonate, which
is what we want. What Le Blanc did was to treat sodium chloride with
sulfuric acid. This gave him sodium sulphate and hydrochloric acid. Then
he heated the sodium sulfate with coke or charcoal and limestone, after
which he extracted the mass with water and found that he had sodium
carbonate in solution.

The steps do not sound difficult but it was really a great feat to
make them commercially possible. In the first stage when sulfuric acid
acted on the salt, hydrochloric acid was given off and this was a great
nuisance. The amount of it produced exceeded any use that could be
found for it and it was poured away; being highly acid it undermined
the houses in the neighborhood and caused a great deal of trouble. Later,
it became the most valuable product of the process because it was con-
verted into bleaching powder by a method that we will take up subse-
quently.

Industry a Result of Chemical Discovery

It is interesting to learn that this process which France invented in her
extremity became one of the largest industrial developments in England.
It caused the flourishing there of the sulfuric acid industry because this
acid was necessary for the process and, as we have seen, sulfuric acid is
tremendously valuable in a great variety of directions. It also made
possible the development of an enormous textile industry because the

244 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

making of cloth needs soap and bleach, both of which were first supplied
in abundance as a consequence of Le Blanc's discovery.

To return to the story of the chemist's transformations of salt, the
present process for the conversion of this compound into sodium car-
bonate is by the action of ammonia and carbon dioxide upon a saturated
solution of it, the carbon dioxide being obtained from limestone. When
these three substances are brought together a change takes place which
can best be described by the following equation:

Carbon Ammonium

Ammonia

Water

Dioxide

Bicarbonate

NH3 +

H20 +

CO2

= NH4 HCO3

Ammonium

Sodium

Ammonium

Salt

Bicarbonate

Chloride

NaCl +

NH4 HCO3 =

NaHC03

+ NH4 Cl

The change that takes place depends on the fact that sodium bicarbonate
is comparatively insoluble and separates out. It is collected and then
heated, the heat causing it to turn into sodium carbonate, carbon dioxide,
and water.

2 NaHCO3 = Na2CO3 + CO2 + H2O

In this process the essential thing is to keep the ammonia in the system,
because it is used over and over again and, if it escapes, an expense arises
out of all proportion to the value of the carbonate which must be sold
at a price of about two cents per pound. The ammonia goes out of the
reaction, as indicated in the equation, in the form of ammonium chloride
and this is returned to the process by allowing quicklime, made by heating
limestone in kilns, to decompose the chloride. The other part of the
limestone (the carbon dioxide) is also used in the process, as shown in the
first equation. We start then with salt, water, and limestone, and we finish
with calcium chloride and sodium carbonate.

Caustic Soda

This is not all that the chemist was able to do with salt. In soap making
much better results are obtained if, instead of using wood ashes which
give us nothing but an impure soft potash soap, we use sodium hydroxide
or caustic soda. Now, caustic soda is something which does not occur in
nature because it always combines with the carbon dioxide of the air or
with some acid material and disappears. The old method of making it
was to take the soda of the Le Blanc process and to treat it with slaked
lime. In this way we can make about a 14 per cent solution of caustic
soda which is then evaporated if it is required in a more concentrated

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 245

form. This method of making caustic soda was sufficiently economical to
give us all that we needed at very reasonable prices, but eventually a
better method was discovered.

Caustic soda is NaOH, that is to say, it is water (HbO) in which one
of the hydrogens has been replaced by sodium. If in any way we could
make this reaction take place, NaClH- HOH = NaOH + HCl, we would
get directly two products which we want. Unfortunately, it is impossible
to get salt to exchange atoms in this way with water. However, a study
of salt solutions showed that the atoms of sodium and chlorine were
actually separated when in solution and that they also acquired a property
which would allow of their segregation. They became electrically charged
and it is always possible to attract an electrically charged body by using
a charged body of opposite sign. If, then, we put the positive and the
negative pole of a battery or another source of electricity in a solution
of salt the chlorine will wander away to the positive and the sodium
will wander to the negative pole.

Electrons

What takes place can best be described by a rough analogy. Suppose
two automobiles of different makes are running side by side, keeping
together because of the friendship which exists between the two parties.
Now suppose these two machines have an accident in which, by a freak,
one wheel is torn off one car and added to the other. Assume that the
occupants of the car are not damaged and that the cars can still run; also
that the fifth wheel is a distinct nuisance. If there were two garages at
considerable distances, one of which specialized in taking off extra wheels
and the other did nothing but put on missing wheels, and the accident
were a common one involving thousands of machines, then it would be
natural for the cars to move in opposite directions to these two garages
and if we assume that all the wheels are interchangeable, then there
might be a traffic between the garages, by another road perhaps, the
wheels being sent from one to the other.

This very rough picture is intended to describe the fact that when the
sodium and chlorine atoms of salt are separated by water the electrons of
which they are composed are distributed in such a way that there is an
extra one in the chlorine which (an electron being negative) makes the
chlorine particle negative, while the sodium lacks one electron and there-
fore becomes positive since it was neutral before. The result, then, of
this electrolysis or use of the electric current in separating the charged
atoms of sodium chloride (the ions as they are called) is that sodium and
chlorine are given off at the two poles. Now, chlorine is not very soluble

246 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

in water and can be collected as a gas. The sodium, on the other hand,
as each little particle is liberated, reacts with the water about it to give
hydrogen and sodium hydroxide. Therefore, we have accomplished what
we set out to do, only instead of getting sodium hydroxide and hydrogen
chloride we get sodium hydroxide, chlorine, and hydrogen.

Electricity

The success of this method is due to discoveries in another field of
science. Only when Michael Faraday's researches on the nature of the
electric current made available another source of energy different from
heat, was it possible for the chemist to carry out what has just been
described; at first only in a very small way but, as the production of
electricity became more and more economical, ever on a larger scale until
now the industry is a most important one.

Chlorine

So far we have directed our attention almost entirely to the sodium
atom of salt; the other part of the molecule, the chlorine, is also extremely
valuable to us. It used to be set free by oxidizing hydrochloric acid of the
Le Blanc process with manganese dioxide. Now, as we have just seen, we
get it directly from a solution of salt by electrolysis.

Uses of Caustic Soda

The two servants which the chemist has conjured out of salt by using
electricity are extremely valuable, though if they are not handled rightly
they are equally as dangerous as they are useful when put to work. Caustic
soda is a white, waxy-looking solid which is extremely soluble in water
and attracts moisture from the air. It is highly corrosive, destroying the
skin and attacking a great many substances. When it is allowed to act on
cellulose in the form of cotton the fiber undergoes a change which results
in its acquiring greater luster so that the process of mercerizing, as it is
called, is valuable industrially. The manufacture of artificial silk made by
the viscose method depends on the fact that caustic soda forms a com-
pound with cellulose. Practically all the soap manufactured at the present
time is produced by the action of caustic soda on fat. The by-product of
this industry is glycerol which is used in making dynamite. In fact, soda
is just as important among alkalies as sulfuric acid is among acids.

Uses of Chlorine

Chlorine, the partner of sodium, is a frightfully destructive material. It
attacks organic substances of all kinds, destroying them completely, and
it also attacks all metals, even platinum and gold, though fortunately, if

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 247

it is quite dry, it does not react with iron, and on that account it can be
stored under pressure in iron cylinders. Although it is such a deadly gas
if allowed to run wild, yet it is extremely useful and its discovery has been
very greatly to the advantage of the human race. First of all, it is employed
in the manufacture of bleaching powder, a product which enables the
cotton industry to work far more intensively than it otherwise could.
Formerly cotton was bleached by laying it on the grass, but that is much
too slow for our present mode of life. In fact, we have no room for it
because it has been calculated that the cotton output of Manchester,
England, would require the whole county as a bleaching field and this is
obviously impossible. Then came the discovery that this same compound
could be used in purifying our water supplies of dangerous disease-breed-
ing bacteria and this has reduced the typhoid death rate from that of a
very dangerous epidemic disease to a negligible figure. Now, whenever
the water supply of a city is questionable, chlorine is pumped right into
the mains or else a solution made from bleaching powder is used. Twenty
parts of bleaching powder per million is sufficient to kill 90 to 95 per
cent of all the bacteria in the water. For medical use, a solution of hypo-
chlorous acid, which is the active principle of bleaching powder, has been
developed into a marvelous treatment for deep-seated wounds, and
recoveries which formerly would have been out of the question are now
possible. Chlorine is also used in very large amounts in making organic
chemicals which the public enjoys as dyestuffs or sometimes does not
enjoy as pharmaceuticals or medicines.

All in all, the products obtained from the little salt cube are of extreme
necessity and importance to every one of us and their utilization shows
what can be done when men of genius devote themselves to the acquisi-
tion of real knowledge and then translate their discoveries into commercial
enterprises for the benefit of humanity.

CHEMISTRY AND UNDERSTANDING

The brief story for which we have space indicates but very dimly the
real interest and fascination the chemist has in handling matter. His
knowledge has increased to such a point that he can build you a molecule
almost to order to meet any specifications. To be without any knowledge
of chemistry is to go through life ignorant of some of the most interesting
aspects of one's surroundings; and yet the acquisition of some knowledge
of this subject is by no means hard. There are any number of books which
tell the story in simple language if you do not wish to study the science
intensively. On the other hand, all that you need is a real interest and a
willingness to think as you read.

The Chemical Revolution

WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT

From Science Today and Tomorrow

FROM THE ADVERTISEMENT OF A NEW YORK DEPART-
MENT STORE:

Grandma got by with a new bonnet and a smear of talc across her pretty
little nose — but times have changed. To make it easier for modern beauties
we have assembled the Personal Spectrum Kit with all related cosmetics to
suit your individual coloring.

From an article by Edsd Ford, exploiter of soy beans and builder of
motor cars:

Our engineers tell us that soy-bean oil and meal are adaptable to by far
the greater part of the many branches of the whole new plastic industry,
and that shortly we are to see radio and other small cabinets, table tops,
flooring tile in a thousand different color combinations, brackets and sup-
ports of a hundred varieties, spools and shuttles for the textile trades,
buttons and many other things of everyday use all coming from the soy-
bean fields.

From an address by the director of an industrial research laboratory:

In 1913 the most carefully made automobile of the day had a body to
which twenty-one coats of paint and varnish were applied. By 1920,
through scientific management, it was possible to do a body-painting job
in about eleven days. In 1923 came the first nitrocellulose lacquers. They
cut the time to two days. Now a whole body is made out of metal and
coated with any color in a day.

From a German scientific magazine:

Over twenty-five years ago the German chemist Todtenhaupt patented
a process to convert the casein of milk into artificial wool. Under the
economic stress of the Ethiopian war the Italians developed the process and
by October 1936 will produce several hundred thousand pounds annually
of artificial wool. No one pretends that it is indistinguishable from natural

248

THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 249

wool. It is still imperfect, but no more imperfect than were the first fibers
of artificial silk. It meets men's needs — all that can be reasonably de-
manded.

Cosmetics, soy-bean products, lacquers, casein "wool" — all are "syn-
thetic," as the term is somewhat loosely used nowadays. There are thou-
sands more like them, transformations of such familiar raw material as
coal, petroleum, wood, slaughterhouse refuse. Indeed, every article that we
touch is a chemical product of some kind, and many a one has no counter-
part in nature.

Despite a million chemical compounds known to technologists, despite
the manifest artificiality of clothes, houses, vehicles, food — all the result of
chemical progress — we have made but a beginning in the creation of a new
environment. If the test of a culture based on science is the degree of its
departure from nature — woven cloth instead of skins, gas in the kitchen
instead of wood, electric lights instead of naked flames, rayon instead of
silk — we are still chemical semi-barbarians.

It is beside the mark to argue that a culture consists of something more
than plastic compounds that take the place of wood and metal. Our society
is what it is just because the engineer and the chemist have struggled with
nature, torn apart her coal, her trees, her beauty, discovered how they were
created, and then proceeded to make new combinations of their own. The
lilies of the field and the honey of the bee are not in themselves sufficient.
On every hand there is synthesis and creation — scents, fabrics, drugs, plas-
tics, metals like aluminum, sodium, and a few thousand alloys that nature
forgot to make when the earth was a cooling but still glowing ball, dyes,
unmatched by any gleam in the iridescent feathers of a peacock's tail, high
explosives, lung-corroding gases, talking-machine records made of carbolic
acid derivatives or artificial resins.

More than the substitution of a synthetic for a natural product is in-
volved. Buttons that look like ivory or bone but are neither, fibers that
mimic silk but are better, automobile upholstery that passes for leather
but is a form of guncotton, photographic films that bring the same screen
plays to tens of millions simultaneously for as little as 25 cents — these are
the outward evidences of a breaking down of social distinctions, of a pro-
found change in life. Gunpowder made all men the same height, said
Carlyle in a fine but unwitting comment on chemistry. The leveling is not
yet ended.

New industries came with the rise of chemistry, and with them new
opportunities for the many. There is a closer relation between democracy
and the laboratory than the historians recognize. The environment has

250 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

been chemically changed, and with that change has come a new vision of
the social future. Is the world ready?

Already a beginning has been made in three-dimensional chemistry. The
potentialities are infinite, breath-taking. Suppose you want something as
transparent as glass but as strong as metal. A three-dimensional chemistry
may achieve it. There is even the possibility that active compounds may
be devised — active in the sense that they would shrink from blows or
electric shocks just as if they were alive.

Much so-called synthesis is merely a transformation of some natural
product. Yet it is an evidence of social and scientific progress. It was a tre-
mendous step from killing an animal and wearing its skin for protection
to weaving a fiber on a deliberately invented loom, and thus making a soft
pliable fabric. But the fibers were nature's after all.

Indians once froze on ledges of coal. Mankind leaped ahead when
inventors showed how coal could be used to raise steam and drive an
engine. But the new conception of coal is chemical. It is a conception of
cosmetics, alcohol, drugs, strange artificial sugars, a million useful com-
pounds. So with wood. It is no longer a material out of which tables and
chairs and houses are built, but cellulose, which can be reconstructed to
assume the form of shimmering, silk-like filaments, cattle fodder, explo-
sives. . . .

Perhaps the most imminent of all the changes that the chemical revolu-
tion will bring about will affect the materials of engineering. This age of
power also is the age of steel. Age of rust would be a better designation.
If it were not for our paints and protective coatings nothing would be left
of this machine civilization a hundred years hence. No less an authority
than Sir Robert Hadfield has estimated that 29,000,000 tons of steel rust
away every year at a cost to mankind of $1,400,000,000. And this is not all.
To produce every pound of this metal, lost by conversion into oxide, four
pounds of coal had to be burned. The chemical revolution has already
ushered in the age of alloys, many of then non-corrosive. There are 2000
of them, and we have nardly begun to create all that the world needs.
Parts of gasoline engines are now made of aluminum alloys. All-metal
airplanes have for years been made of duraluminum— a strong, tough,
artificial metal. Aluminum alloys can be made as strong as steel. Very
rapidly they are making their way in industry.

What a tremendous amount of energy is wasted in hauling, lifting, and
spinning unnecessarily heavy masses of metal! It costs now 5 cents a pound
a year to move the dead weight of a street car. Think of the solid steel
trains hauled by solid steel locomotives, of automobiles made largely of
steel, of cranes that must be made of tremendous size and power to Hit

THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 251

gigantic masses of steel machinery! Tradition has obsessed us with the
notion that weight and strength are synonymous. Gradually the metal-
lurgist is breaking down this old conservatism.

Ten thousand years ago, indeed until very recently, the metallurgist was
a random smelter and mixer of metals. Bronze was one of his magnificent
accidental discoveries. But how different today! With X-rays he peers right
into the heart of a crystal — for nearly everything in the crust of the earth
is crystalline — and sees how the atoms are placed. He juggles temperatures
— relates them to such properties as toughness, magnetism, lightness. He
makes a mixture of aluminium, nickel, and copper. The result is a
magnet that can lift a hundred times its own weight or an alloy so light
that stratosphere balloon gondolas are made of it.

Already he has reached the stage where he can synthesize a metal for a
special purpose. Suppose he were to design and build an alloy with five
times the tensile limit of any we now have — not a wild impossibility. When
he succeeds, "the art of transportation on land and sea will be revolu-
tionized and, unfortunately, the methods of warfare," thinks Dr. Vannevar
Bush of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many of these alloys still to be discovered will be used in the home.
Wood as a structural material is already doomed. Two centuries hence an
ordinary white-pine kitchen chair of today will be treasured as an almost
priceless antique. Quarried stone will be used only for buildings near the
quarry. For the most part our houses will be cages of rustless alloy steel,
around which cement or some other artificial plastic material will be
poured.

Furniture will be made of a beautiful synthetic plastic material, a com-
bination of carbolic acid and formaldehyde discovered and first applied
industrially by a Belgian chemist, Dr. L. H. Baekeland, which is destined
to become so cheap that it will compete with wood. The panes of the
windows through which sunlight streams and the glassware that glitters
on the carbolic acid-formaldehyde sideboard will be made of a scratch-
proof synthetic product of organic chemistry which will be transparent,
insoluble in water, and unbreakable.

Draperies, rugs, bed and table "linen" by the year 2000 will be tissues
of synthetic fibers. Washing will be obsolete. Bedsheets, tablecloths, and
napkins will be thrown away after use. Draperies and rugs will not be
cleaned, for as soon as they show signs of dirt or wear new ones will take
their places. The household of the chemical future will probably spend no
more in a year for its fabrics than it does now for mere laundering. Hence
housework will be reduced to a pleasant minimum involving scarcely more
than the dusting of synthetic furniture and the mopping of synthetic floors.

252 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Synthetic, too, will be the apparel of those who will live this easy life,
Cotton, silk, wool, and such fibers as linen will still be spun, but only the
very rich or the very snobbish will buy the fabrics into which they are
woven. Such material will be as unnecessary as are the expensive furs in
which fashionable men and women still clothe themselves — mere survivals
of a picturesque time when animals had to be skinned or clipped to make
a suit of clothes. Already the silkworm is doomed as an adjunct of indus-
try. Time was when only the worm knew how to change the woody
tissues, or cellulose, of a tree into glossy threads. Now the chemist converts
the tree into rayon and even makes silk, or something very like it, out of
coal, limestone, and nitrogen.

Synthetic wool is a commercial reality. The achievement was inevitable.
Perhaps within ten years, certainly within twenty, a man will buy a ready-
made suit of synthetic wool as warm as any now made from natural wool,
and free from shoddy, and $10 will be a high price to pay for it. Even the
most knowing sheep would be deceived by the yarn. There will be the
same "feel," the same fluffiness and waviness.

This $10 suit is almost attainable now. In the more distant future syn-
thetic fibers still to be evolved will completely revolutionize tailoring. The
cheapest suit of clothes is now stitched. What if machines do most of the
sewing and if buttonholes are mechanically formed and finished ? The cost
is high. Suppose we assign to the chemist and the efficiency engineer this
problem of keeping the body warm and the person presentable. The first
step is to abandon the old tradition of durability. Why must even the
cheapest suit last at least a year? Is not the standard merely a heritage from
a time when money was scarce and when a suit of clothes simply had to
endure?

The synthetic chemist proceeds to create new fibers. Cheapness is his
goal. His threads may be lacking in tensile strength and therefore in
durability. But the fabric into which they are woven is not intended to last
a year. Something much cheaper than artificial silk or wool is produced.
In fact, it is so cheap that a suit can be made for a dollar — a suit that will
be as ephemeral as a butterfly and will be thrown into the ash barrel in
two weeks. . . .

"* The synthetically clad man of the future will surely nourish himself on
synthetic food. Ultimately even the soluble dish will be regarded as an
interesting heirloom of a still fairly savage past when man chewed vege-
tation which had been boiled or baked, and actually killed and roasted
animals for the sake of their proteins. But the year 2000 seems much too
early a date for the achievement of synthetic nutriment, considering the
staggering difficulties that the chemist must overcome. . . .

*939

Jets Power Future Flying

WATSON DAVIS

HERE'S POWER IN ROARING FLAMES-WHETHER IN
-1L a windswept forest fire, your oil burner, or a jet plane of the future.

There's simplicity in a stream of speedy gas pushing an airplane for-
ward.

Jets with their simple power are revolutionizing travel through the air
— for peaceful transport or for atomic war if we fail in our attempt to get
along with the other peoples of the world.

Applying jet propulsion to our airplanes is the high priority task for
our research laboratories today. Already the P-8os, with turbine-jet engines,
have made obsolete the best conventional fighter planes with the best in-
ternal combustion engines. Jet bombers are being flown experimentally.
Jet transport planes are on the drawing boards.

The reciprocating, spark-fired internal combustion engine feeding on
gasoline (look under the hood of your automobile to see one) has a rival
that may drive it out of the air.

FOUR TYPES OF JETS

There are four different types of jet-propulsion units:

The turbo-jet and turbo-propeller-jet engines, which operate through
the principle of the gas turbine.

The pulse-jet, used by the Germans as the propulsion unit of the V-i
"buzz" bomb.

The ram-jet, currently undergoing rapid development for use on guided
missiles or other highspeed transportation.

The rocket, most highly developed in the German V-2 weapon.

Only the turbo-jet and turbo-prop-jet engines rely upon gas-turbine-
driven compressors to compress the intake air. The pulse-jet and the ram-
jet use oxygen of the air for burning their fuel, but compress the air by
their speed. The rocket supplies its own oxygen and thus can go outside
the atmosphere.

253

254 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

The principle of the combustion gas turbine is not new, but it makes
possible the development of turbo-jet and turbo-prop-jet engines for air-
craft. The future of marine and railroad locomotive propulsion will feel
its impact. History is full of attempts to develop a satisfactory gas turbine.
Early experimenters were unsuccessful. They were handicapped both by
lack of knowledge which would permit design of efficient compressors
and turbines, and by lack of the proper materials of construction.

WAR SPURRED RESEARCH

The wartime need for greater and greater speed in aircraft prompted
intensive research that before and during the war increased our knowledge
of aerodynamics. Metals were devised that would stand up for extremely
high temperatures. This made possible the development of the gas turbine,
in the form of the turbo-jet engine, for aircraft. This new type of engine
is one of the outstanding developments since the Wrights flew the first
heavier-than-air machines.

The design of the combustion gas turbine is simple. There is only one
major moving part, a rotating shaft on which is mounted an air compressor
and a turbine rotor. The compressor supplies air to the combustion cham-
bers where fuel is burned continuously to increase the energy content
of the compressed air by heating it. The resulting hot gases are then ex-
panded through a turbine. The turbine rotor and shaft revolve. In the case
of the turbo-jet engine, only sufficient energy is recovered by the turbine
to drive the compressor, and the hot gases leaving the turbine are exhausted
through nozzles to form the jet. The reaction to the jet propels the air-
craft as a result of the increase in momentum of the air stream due to its
rise in temperature and volume as it passes through the unit.

In the prop-jet engine, the greater part of the energy available in the
hot gases from the combustion chamber is recovered by the turbine. The
power thus available, over and above that required to drive the compressor
is utilized to drive an air screw propeller, in the case of high-speed aircraft.

Great amounts of fuel and air consumed by the gas-turbine engine in de-
veloping its great power are astounding. Philetus H. Holt, a research direc-
tor of the Standard Oil Development Co., has figured that a turbo-jet
engine developing 4,000 pounds thrust, equivalent to 4,000 horsepower at
375 miles per hour, will require more than 4,000,000 cubic feet of air in an
hour. At this rate, all the air in a typical six-room house would be exhausted
in about nine seconds. Approximately 20 barrels of fuel are burned each
hour — enough fuel, if it were gasoline, to drive an automobile 12,000 miles
at a speed of 60 miles per hour, or, if heating oil, enough to heat a typical
six-room house for two-thirds of a heating season.

JETS POWER FUTURE FLYING 255

Heat is released in the combustion chambers of the turbo-jet engine at
the rate of about 20,000,000 Btu. per hour per cubic foot of combustion
zone, which may be compared with a rate of one to two million Btu. per
hour per cubic foot in the case of industrial furnaces. This great develop-
ment of power is accomplished with a freedom from vibration unknown
in reciprocating engines.

HIGH-SPEED ENGINE

Where fuel economy is of secondary importance, the turbo-jet engine
far surpasses the conventional reciprocating engine when high speed at
present altitudes is necessary, as is the case in fighters, interceptors, and fast
attack bombers. When pressurized cabins are used combined with turbo-
jet power at very high altitude, fast, long-range commercial transports will
be attractive to airlines. At altitudes of 40,000 feet or higher the turbo-jet
unit is much more economical of fuel than at low altitudes.

Long flights of 3,000 miles, which presently take 12 to 14 hours, will be
made in six to seven hours. Equipment and pilots will do double jobs; pas-
sengers will get there faster.

The turbo-propeller-jet power plant has the possibility of competing
directly with the conventional reciprocating engine at present-day speeds,
since improvements in design should soon give fuel economy and operating
life equivalent to those of the reciprocating engine.

How soon will your airlines ticket give you such flight ? Some estimate
they will come in three years, others in five years and others still 10 years
or longer. The rapidity of their introduction, say the engineers, will be in
direct proportion to the amount and calibre of the effort expended in re-
search and development.

Turbo-jets will do their job at double the speeds of present airlines, but
aviation will turn to the ram-jet to surpass the speed of sound.

Speeds twice the speed of sound, some 1,400 miles per hour, have been
achieved for short flights by the "flying stovepipe."

Jap Kamikaze "suicide" planes sparked the post-haste development of
the ram-jet to power the Navy's "Bumblebee" anti-aircraft weapon that
would have been shooting them down if the war had lasted.

The ram-jet idea is not new, although, like other modern jet engines, it
is 20th century in its conception. Rene Lorin, a Frenchman, proposed in
1908 the use of the internal combustion engine exhaust for jet propulsion,
and in his scheme the engine did not produce power in any other way.
Five years later he described a jet engine where the air was compressed
solely by the velocity, or ram, effect of the entering air. This is the ram-jet.

The nickname of the ram-jet, "flying stove-pipe," describes what it looks

256 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

like. It is a cylindrical duct, with a varying diameter. The air enters through
a tapered nosepiece and it comes in at a speed above that of sound. The
ram-jet is only efficient when it goes through the air at speeds higher than
the speed of sound, which is about 700 miles per hour. In the military
version of the ram-jet, it is launched and brought up to speed by rockets
which soon burn themselves out and give way to the ram-jet itself.

Air entering the tube when the ram-jet is in flight is slowed down to be-
low the speed of sound. The air mixes with the fuel. The very simple de-
vice for doing this is at present one of the secrets in the ram-jet, as applied
as an anti-aircraft weapon. The diflfuser in the air duct stabilizes the
flame and the combustion of the gases increases very rapidly through the
duct. Just to the rear of the ram-jet the gases attain a speed of up to 2,000
miles per hour.

When supersonic transportation of mail, express and ultimately pas-
sengers is contemplated, the ram-jet offers a motor of great promise. The
present military development of this device is by commercial and industrial
agencies, under sponsorship of the Bureau of Ordnance of the Navy, with
the coordination of the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins
University. This development may influence peacetime transportation of
the future world.

In the future, liquid fuels that are produced from petroleum will be made
to fit the requirements of jet engines. Particular fuel requirements for the
turbo-jet engine may even bring kerosene and other distillates heavier
than gasoline back into prominence.

During the war some of the jet planes were designed to burn kerosene
while other jet devices operated on hundred octane gasoline. Such high oc-
tane gasoline was not actually necessary but due to the fact that much of
the aviation fuel in the war areas was high octane, it was used to simplify
the problem of supply.

If jet planes were used in another war emergency, a fifth of the U. S.
petroleum refining capacity would be used for making jet fuels, Robert
P. Russell, president of the Standard Oil Development Co., estimated re-
cently. Designing of fuel that can be used in a variety of jet motors is as
important as designing jet motors themselves. Military specifications are
now being considered that will cause more of the fractions of petroleum
to be used in making jet fuel. This may prove to be one of the most im-
portant decisions affecting flying power for the future.

'947

Science in War and After

GEORGE RUSSELL HARRISON

From Atoms in Action

HHYPICAL OF THE TREND TOWARD REAL BATTLESHIPS
JL of the air is the Douglas ¥-19 bomber designed for the U. S. Army,
which made its first flight early in 1941. The yoton weight of this great
plane, twice as heavy as the famous Atlantic Clipper ships, is borne by
wings stretching 210 feet from side to side. With 11,000 gallons of gasoline
in its tanks to feed the four thirsty engines which release 2000 horsepower
each, this giant plane can carry 28 tons of bombs to a point 3000 miles
away, and return without re-fueling.

Though the trend will probably be toward even larger battleships of
the air, there is a limit to the weight of airplanes which can alight on
land. When the yo-ton bomber is on the ground its entire weight must
be supported on its wheels, and these are large and unwieldy in the
extreme. In fact, the only accident to the first of these great bombers
occurred when one of its wheels sank through a macadam pavement.
Pontoons rather than wheels will avoid this problem, and it seems likely
that the giant flying battleships of the future, if such there must be, will
rest on water when not in the air.

The tremendous destruction produced in Europe during the present
war by falling bombs is likely to lead one to think that the bomber has
everything his own way. This is becoming increasingly less true as defen-
sive measures are perfected. Entirely apart from this, the bomber who is
trying to destroy an important target is faced with a difficult problem at
best. Airplanes do not stand still in the air, or even travel in straight lines
when anti-aircraft shells are bursting around them, and to hit a target
five miles below from a platform moving erratically through the air at
400 miles an hour requires more than mere skill. It requires the assistance
of cleverly designed scientific apparatus — hence the great secrecy regard-
ing bomb-sights.

A bomb dropped from a plane strikes the ground far ahead of the point
directly under the position of the plane when the bomb was dropped.

257

258 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Since the bomb when released is moving forward with the plane, usually
as fast as a revolver bullet, it falls to earth in a broad parabola. During the
twenty or more seconds which elapse while it is falling, it may travel
more than two miles forward. In addition, cross-winds at various levels
can in twenty seconds blow the bomb far to one side or the other. Various
bomb-sights have been developed which enable the pilot quickly and
automatically to allow for these effects. These are complicated combina-
tions of telescope, speed indicator, and computing machine whose details
are kept rigorously secret by the various powers.

During the first few months of the aerial bombardment of Britain in
1940 the German bombers seemed invincible, but gradually the funda-
mental truth, that for every new offense there is a satisfactory defensive
answer, has been borne out. First came the defeat of the day bomber by
the pursuit plane, and when losses during each daylight raid rose to 10
per cent, the Germans were forced to restrict bombing operations to the
hours of darkness, when pursuit planes could not find the bombers.

Several months passed during which night bombing raids were the
most pressing problem facing the British, but gradually hints began to
appear which indicated that a solution of the night-bomber problem was
imminent. At the end of 1940 the Air Chief Marshal announced that a
method for frustrating night bombers had been found, and in June of
1941, the basis of the method was made public. It was the radio-locator,
and this, widely publicized as Britain's secret defense weapon, gives an
excellent example of the use of science in defensive warfare. As far as an
enemy bomber is concerned the device is used to turn night into day. If
no light waves are available to see with, says the scientist, look around
for some other type of waves.

Actually nature perfected a similar method of detecting night fliers long
before the airplane was dreamed of. For hundreds of years bats have
been able to fly about in pitch-black caves without colliding with each
other or with obstacles in their paths. Scientists have stretched numerous
criss-cross wires in a room, and then darkened the room completely before
bats were brought into it, yet when the bats were released they flew
blithely about without once striking against a wire.

Careful tests showed that the bats were indeed flying blind, for when
adhesive tape was placed over both eyes a bat could avoid the wires quite
as well as with its eyes uncovered. Though the proverbial bat may be
blind, it can steer at high speed quite as well as any sharp-eyed lynx.

When adhesive tape was placed over the ears of the bats, however, the

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER 259

results were very different — the uncanny power disappeared completely.
Similarly were they handicapped if the power of hearing was restored,
but their mouths were taped shut.

Scientists found that the bats were constantly broadcasting high-pitched
squeaks during flight, sounds so shrill that only occasionally could an un-
usually low one be heard by human ears. These sounds were quite audible
to the ears of the bat, and could of course be detected by special micro-
phones. When several bats were set flying around a dark room in which
only the flutter of skinny wings was audible to the crouching scientists,
the microphone detectors showed the air to be filled with a shrill clamor
of very short wavelength — a super-sound related to ordinary tones as
ultra-violet light is related to visible light. The human ear cannot hear
waves vibrating faster than 20,000 times a second, but the bat language
used for aerial navigation is found to be loudest at 50,000 vibrations a
second.

As a blind man walking along a sidewalk keeps tapping with his cane
to produce sounds which will be reflected from walls and other obstacles,
so the bat keeps broadcasting his shrill cries and these, reflected from other
bats, walls, or even wires, come back to his sensitive ears and warn him
of danger ahead.

Though these super-sound waves will do very well for the navigation
of bats, or even of boats, they would be of little help in steering airplanes
in the dark, for these waves move no faster than ordinary sound waves,
and we have already seen that a fast airplane flies at two-thirds of this
speed.

Far more effective for this purpose, and capable of being used in the
same way that bats use super-sound, are radio waves. These travel nearly
a million times as fast as sound waves, and since airplanes fly only about
ten times as fast as bats, this gives ample margin, providing science can
furnish a means of responding to the reflected wave which is about
100,000 times as fast as the response mechanism of the bat. This rapid
response mechanism British scientists have been able to develop.

To detect something with waves it is necessary that the waves used be
not much longer than the object being detected. Therefore, to locate an
enemy bomber having a wing span of 100 feet, one should use waves not
much more than 100 feet long. Other factors make still shorter waves
desirable, and radio waves only a few feet long, micro-waves, are found
to solve the problem admirably.

What an effective picture of the secret maneuvermgs of science this
presents! Here we have German planes loaded with destructive bombs,
five miles up in the air, swiftly feeling their way toward London by fol-

260 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

lowing a beam of radio waves sent from a station behind them in France,
Such beam flying has of course been used for years, and is a common-
place feature of most airlines in peacetime. But how is the bomber to
know when to drop its destructive cargo? From Norway or some other
point making a wide angle with the first beam another radio beam is
sent, directed to intersect the first beam directly over the target. When
signals in his earphones tell the pilot that he has reached this intersection,
he drops his load of bombs and turns to streak for home. Scientifically
designed murder, to be sure, but this is not the whole story.

Scattered all over Great Britain are short-wave radio stations which
send beams of micro-waves toward the invasion coast. When the sky
above France is clear of planes no waves are reflected to the sensitive
receivers which the British keep constantly on watch. But when a plane
rises into the air even 100 miles away, according to news reports, it reflects
back some of the micro-waves, and thus can be detected in ample time to
let interceptors take the air and be ready for it.

So important was the radio-locator that it was officially given the credit
of enabling the Royal Air Force to win the first defense of Britain. British
scientists had been working on the method for five years or longer, and
scientists everywhere are gratified that this most spectacular secret weapon
is of purely defensive value. The principle was available to the Germans
and was doubtless known by them, but this lessens its value to the British
or any other defending community not one whit.

There are times when a new type of camera is more important to an
army than a new type of gun, and when a good photographer is of greater
value than an able sharp-shooter. Before and during an intensive cam-
paign dozens of planes may fly over the enemy lines every day without
dropping a bomb or firing a shot. These planes contain complex oversized
cameras with which pictures of the terrain are taken, to detect any
changes in its appearance since the previous flight. The eye of the camera
has a great advantage over that of any human observer, for not only can
it absorb an entire scene in a few thousandths of a second, but it brings
back a record of what it saw which is permanent and far more revealing,
when examined slowly and in detail, than the most lingering glance of
an observer in an airplane. Films taken on two successive days can be
superposed in such a way that differences between the two — a departed
ship, a freshly bombed oil-tank, or newly camouflaged artillery — will
stand out vividly from an unobtrusive background of details common to
both photographs.

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER 261

Reconnaissance planes are as vulnerable to attack as any others, so they
must fly as fast and as high as possible. Great altitude requires provision
of giant cameras, weighing several hundred pounds and costing more
than $5000 apiece, with very large lenses. To take a photograph from a
height of several miles which will reveal details as small as a man requires
the use of a lens consisting of four to six carefully shaped pieces of the
finest glass, each as large as a dinner plate. Such a camera is, in fact, a
telescope of sufficient size to delight the heart of almost any astronomer.
To provide a shutter big enough to cover such a lens, which can yet open
and close within a few thousandths of a second, requires careful scientific
designing, yet this is necessary if the photographs are to be brilliantly
sharp and clear.

When flying a reconnaissance plane, a pilot must be prepared to level
off at some definite height and fly a long, straight course while photo-
graphs are being taken. When a red light starts blinking on his instrument
panel, the pilot knows that he must fly the ship on an even keel so the
photographer can snap mile after mile of enemy territory, taking several
hundred pictures on a single roll of film. Automatic timers are sometimes
used, which click the shutter at any desired regular interval. It was com*
mon knowledge in 1941 that every day hundreds of miles of the "invasion
coast" of France was thus photographed by the Royal Air Force. From
some of the planes used for this purpose pictures were taken at an altitude
of more than five miles. By using multiple cameras in which each click
of the shutter took nine pictures through as many lenses, an area as great
as 900 square miles was photographed with each exposure.

The greater the altitude from which photographs are taken, the more
likely is the ground beneath to be partially hidden by haze. Light scattered
from this haze changes what would otherwise be a crisp and vivid picture
into one of dull uniformity and low detail. Longer waves than those our
eyes can see will be less scattered by the haze, and for this reason infra-red
photography has become of great importance in modern warfare. But
longer exposures are required when the specially sensitized film needed
for infra-red exposures is used. For this reason all the armies of the world
have been concerned with the development of infra-red film of increased
sensitivity.

As enemy territory* becomes more thoroughly protected by fighter
planes during daylight hours, it becomes increasingly difficult to take the
desired reconnaissance photographs each day. Therefore, the trend is
toward more night photography, when darkness lends to planes increased
safety from antiaircraft fire and aerial pursuit. Thus flashlight photog-
raphy has been brought into warfare, but flashlights on what a scale 1

262 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

Instead of filling with light a small room or even a huge auditorium, the
flash must illuminate the whole of outdoors!

To make an area of many square miles as bright as day, even if only
for an instant, army photographers have developed amazing flashlights
which consist of great sacks full of magnesium powder, wafted slowly to
earth by small parachutes. When the photographer wishes to take a pic-
ture, he merely tosses a sack of the powder over the side of his plane. The
parachute with which the sack is provided opens automatically, and a
fuse is set off which explodes the bomb a few seconds later, after the
powder has had time to fall the desired distance below the plane, and has
lagged sufficiently behind it. A blinding flash of light comes from the
exploding powder, and the first light from this flash strikes a phototube
on the plane, and immediately opens the shutter of the camera. Events
are automatically timed so that the shutter opens just as die landscape is
most brightly illuminated.

Camouflage — the art of concealment by merging an object with its
surroundings, or by making it appear to be what it is not — requires in-
creasing cleverness if it is to withstand successfully the searching eye of
the camera. An outstanding example of this occurred in July, 1941, when
the British published photographs showing how the Germans had at-
tempted to mislead them into bombing an innocuous block of houses in
Hamburg instead of the great railroad terminus which the British were
seeking. A bridge over a narrow body of water pointed directly at the
railway station, and this the British airmen had been using as a landmark.
The ingenious and industrious Germans covered the offending body of
water as far as the bridge with rafts carrying false houses, and a short
distance away installed a false bridge which pointed at the block destined
for sacrifice in place of the station. This device might have succeeded had
not the superposition of photographs taken before and after the alteration
revealed the shift.

The stereoscopic camera, with two lenses giving a pair of photographs
which, when viewed properly, merge into one which has depth and a
lifelike appearance of solidity, is especially valuable in revealing camou-
flage of a common type. On developing photographs of a certain enemy
flying-field, British officers found that something looked queer about a
group of airplanes packed closely in one corner of the field. The planes
looked ordinary enough when viewed from the air, and in the usual
photographs, but when a stereoscopic camera was used they appeared
quite flat and lifeless in the resulting views, instead of sticking up from
the ground as they should. It is not difficult to imagine the feelings of the
soldiers who had diligently fitted together boards in airplane shapes, laid

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER 263

them on the ground, and painted them, when next day a lone bomber,
sailing over on the way to deeper-lying territory, carefully dropped two
wooden bombs on the field.

Of great value in detecting camouflage of another sort is color photog-
raphy, but strangely enough, ordinary color photography often is not
so useful as partially color-blind photography. Certain commanders were
surprised to find that one or two of their aerial observers were able to
detect four times as many camouflaged objects behind the enemy lines
as most of their observers could see. Tests showed that the abnormally
sensitive observers were color-blind.

The explanation was not far to seek. The camouflaged objects had been
carefully painted by soldiers with normal vision, who had matched their
paints in color with the surrounding green foliage. The color-blind ob-
servers, however, could not see green anyway. The greenness which, to
a person of normal vision, obliterated lesser differences between paint
and foliage, was eliminated in their eyes, leaving contrasts of redness or
blueness or tone or shade to stand out vividly.

This discovery caused many articles to be published stating that color-
blind persons would be in great demand as aerial observers. Such was not
the case, for although it is impossible to give normal color-vision to a
person who is color-blind, it is quite easy to give artificial color-blindness
to any person with normal vision. All that is needed is to equip him with
a pair of colored glasses which will absorb light of the color he is not to
see. A pair of magenta lenses will make him green-blind, for no green
light can traverse them, while blue lenses will make him red-blind. Such
colored glasses have indeed been found of great value in aerial observation,
and the really scientific camoufleur should use a spectroscope to be sure
his paints match the foliage for any light waves that may strike them.
To make the match complete with surroundings, he must include the
invisible ultra-violet and infra-red waves as well as those which the eye
can see, for the eye of the camera can see several octaves of color, whereas
the human eye can see but one. By using the proper color filters on his
scientifically equipped camera the aerial photographer can ferret out any
object in which all colors, invisible as well as visible, have not been closely
matched with those of the surroundings.

The tank, introduced by the British during the first World War and
since developed by other nations into a formidable juggernaut, is the
modern scientific equivalent of the armored knight of the Middle Ages.
Because spices had to be used instead of refrigerants to keep meat palata-

264 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

ble in those days, and because nothing was known about balanced diets
and vitamines, the medieval knight was rather a stunted fellow by mod-
ern standards. Most of the suits of armor preserved in museums are found
to fit men less than five feet six inches tall.

Even the most colossal knight would not have been strong enough to
carry armor of sufficient thickness to withstand modern high-power
bullets, however. To be sure, he could clothe himself and his staggering
horse in heavy armor, but once dislodged he became powerless. What
more reasonable than to substitute an automobile for the horse, use tractor
treads to cover rough ground at high speed, and put the armor on the
resulting tank instead of on the man?

The tank, like the airplane, is undergoing a period of rapid engineering
development, with scientists concerned principally in making its armor
tougher and more resistant to penetration. The larger a tank is made, the
more powerful can its engine be, and the greater the proportion of its
weight which can be used for defensive armor and offensive armament.
A bullet an inch and a half in diameter was formerly big enough to punch
holes in a tank, but now shells three inches in diameter are necessary.
Thus y-ton light tanks must give way to 25-ton medium tanks, which in
turn retire before the great 80- and zoo-ton tanks now being introduced.

There is a limit to the concentration of weight which soil can hold,
however, and if the weight of a tank is to be increased its treads must
cover a larger area. But the larger the tank the less strong does its un-
wieldly bulk become. Like the dinosaur, too large a tank is impractical,
and may ultimately collapse of its own weight. For this reason the battle-
ship of the land can never expect to compete with the battleship of the
sea, which, like the whale, is supported in depth as well as in area. Land
tanks weighing 200 tons may become practicable, but to hold 40,000 ton
tanks, a liquid is the only suitable medium.

On the sea, armor plate can really come into its own, and a solid two-
foot thickness of the toughest steel can be used to make an almost
impenetrable barrier. The resulting battleship spends most of its life in
harbor, or cruising about merely existing as a threat to lesser vessels,
waiting for the few minutes or hours when it may be in action. Then
precision of fire is of the utmost importance, and the fate of a whole navy
or nation may depend on the extra thickness of a hair by which the
muzzle of a i6-inch rifle is elevated. The enemy is to be struck if possible
before his shells can strike back; no useful development of science which
will bring this about is considered too expensive.

Between 1911 and 1941 the biggest rifles used by the navies of the
world have swelled from 12 inches in diameter to 17. This has made

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER 265

possible the hurling of tons of steel 28 miles instead of a mere n, with
a vast increase in accuracy. No navy expects to hit its target at the first
salvo, which must be considered as several thousand dollars spent to find
out how the wind is blowing and how accurately certain intricate cal-
culating machines have been used to determine range and direction of
aim. In the better navies the target is supposed to be struck on the third
salvo, but the second is becoming increasingly useful as better scientific
methods of measurement are brought to bear on the problem.

To hit a target 30,0000 yards away requires careful determination of
the speed of both vessels, the angles of pitch and roll of the ship, the
barometric pressure, the humidity of the air, and even the temperature of
the powder loaded into the gun. To introduce all these factors involves
extensive computing which, if done with pencil and paper, would require
days to complete. Instead, great computing machines are used on which
the temperature of the powder can be set in with one crank, humidity
with another, range, speed, and the rest of the factors with others; then
the wheels turn and the correct setting of the guns is calculated auto-
matically within a few seconds.

Before the calculating machines can be set into operation, careful
measurements must be made with a dozen scientific instruments, and
of these the range-finder is perhaps most interesting. This has the difficult
task of measuring the distance to a target, which may be anywhere from
half a mile to thirty miles away. A modern range-finder may contain
1600 parts built with the utmost precision, and may cost as much as
$40,000. In it are glass prisms whose sides are so true that if one were
extended a distance of 80 miles, the line would be within a foot of its
correct course. A modern battleship is likely to have at least four of these
instruments, with two smaller ones pointed into the air to determine the
heights of airplanes.

There are several types of range-finders, but most involve a principle
similar to that involved in telling how far away an object is by looking
at it with both eyes open. Look at your finger held six inches from your
nose and your two eyes will be turned in sharply; now look at something
far away, and the eyes will turn so as to look in almost parallel directions.

If human beings had eyes set farther apart in their heads than they
now are, we would be able to judge distance more accurately than we
now can. In the range-finder the two eyes may be placed as much as
thirty feet apart, by using prisms to bend the light rays. Two telescopes
are set into opposite ends of a long tube, and the light which comes
through these is sent by prisms and lenses into the two eyes of the ob-
server.

266 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

One of the telescopes always looks straight ahead, but the other can
be swung through an angle to look at any object at which the other
telescope may be pointed. The observer sees his target magnified as in
an ordinary telescope, but everything above the middle of the image has
come through one telescope, and everything below through the other.
He can turn a handle until the two parts of the target come together into
one well-fitted picture; then both telescopes are pointed directly at the
target.

The turning of the handle also operates a computing machine, which
works out the mathematics involved in finding how far away an object is
when the lines of sight of the two telescopes make a certain angle. The dis-
tance to the target can be read directly from a dial which gives the correct
answer no matter where the handle is set; thus ranges up to 40,000 yards
can be read quickly to within one salvo pattern.

Range-finders are usually placed high above the deck of a battleship,
to enable them to peer over the bulge of the earth at distant objects. That
the guns are many feet below the range-finders, and must be pointed high
into the air rather than directly at the target, while they rock from side
to side as the boat rolls and pitches on the waves, does not disturb the
mechanisms charged with the duty of landing the first salvo close to the
target.

Even as early as 1935 Hitler had turned the major attention of German
scientists to the search for new developments useful in war. As his threat
developed other nations began tardily following suit. In Great Britain
the demand of the armed services for physicists and chemists became so
great in 1941 that these key scientists were not permitted to enlist as
soldiers, but were drafted for laboratory work. A great shortage of
trained scientists soon developed in all the warring countries.

Recognizing that the most powerful weapons of offense and defense
are furnished by science, the man in the street, particularly in America,
has attempted to do his bit as an inventor. Since 1918, a Naval Consulting
Board in Washington is said to have received 110,000 letters containing
suggestions for improvements in naval defense, and a National Inventors
Council was set up by the United States Government in 1940, to aid
inventors who wished to make suggestions. Some of the ideas received
were rather amazing, but a sufficient number to justify the effort of the
board of experts who sorted them out were said to have merit. . . .

A favorite field of amateur inventors in wartime is the "death ray," but
this is a device on which scientists waste no time whatever. All that is

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER 267

needed to make a death ray usable is the discovery of a suitable ray.
None of the agencies known to physicists at the present time is one-
thousandth as effective in destructive action as the shell or bomb con-
taining a powerful explosive, demolishing what it strikes by the impact
of matter on matter. . , .

Discussion of the responsibility of science for ills of the human race,
of which the miseries of war are at present most striking, is to a con-
siderable degree academic. We cannot be rid of science if we would,
for science is, after all, nothing but knowledge, and it is doubtful that
the human race has the ability to keep itself in everlasting ignorance, even
if this should be proved desirable. Few persons would argue that igno-
rance is desirable, but many point out that man's spiritual development
has not kept pace with his material progress. This is obviously true, but
blame for the situation can as justly be attached to the slowness of
spiritual development as to the rapidity of material progress. Actually,
of course, the difficulty arises from the fact that spiritual development
comes only from human experience. Nature provides an automatic
compensating mechanism, such that if material progress is too rapid,
suffering results which accelerates spiritual progress.

Most of the clamor against science arises, not from real worry about
spiritual development, but because it is human nature to take benefits
for granted, while complaining loudly against accompanying disad-
vantages. It is of value to pause and note how easily these disadvantages
are exaggerated.

Much of the horror of modern warfare arises from the fact that
hundreds of millions of people, through the agency of radio, motion pic-
tures, and the daily press, are brought far closer in imagination to the
battlefield than was ever possible before. Though more people do suffer
as a result of warfare nowadays, a larger proportion of them suffer only
mentally and in anticipation.

Science, with its improved methods of communication, is responsible
for the fact that the number of things we find to worry about is increas-
ing from day to day. Science is, however, also responsible for the fact that
there is an even more rapid increase in the fraction of these terrible
things which never happen. . . .

In what are sometimes called "the good old days," war, famine, and
pestilence were considered inevitable. If half a man's family was wiped
out in a week by diphtheria, that was the will of God. Now man has
made use of his God-given opportunities to control famines which arise

268 MATTER, ENERGY, PHYSICAL LAW

from natural causes. Through science the Black Plague, cholera, yellow
fever, and a dozen other pestilences have been wiped out, and the
rest are on the way. The twentieth century may well see war, this
further "pestilence," eliminated, as through the natural sciences man
gradually raises the level of availability of the things he needs for health,
security, comfort, education, and enlightenment, by creating more and
more order in nature.

We hear much about the "good old days," but the world is growing
older every day, not younger. Opportunity knocks on every hand for him
who has ears to hear, and there is ample evidence that the best "old days"
lie ahead.

Edition of 1941

PART FOUR

THE WORLD OF LIFE

Synopsis

A. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

WE HAVE SCANNED THE SKIES, WANDERED OVER THE
earth, penetrated the atom. As yet we have not touched the World of Life.

What is this Life? In what shadowy spot, as yet unknown, does the
transition from the dead to the quick take place? We know many of the
processes involved in living. We still do not know what life really is. W. /. V.
Osterhout, the botanical scientist who has done much to push back the
borders of the unknown, opens our discussion with The Nature of Life. He
exposes many misconceptions, although he leaves the question unsettled.
And yet, it is possible to see how living things exist in nature — their chem-
ical properties, actions and reactions, adaptation to environment, develop-
ment and multiplication. That is the theme of The Characteristics of Organ-
isms by Sir /. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes.

We can also trace the course of man's belief in the spontaneous origin of
life, especially as it relates to the study of the smallest living creatures under
the microscope. The study begins with Leeuwenhoek, Paul de Kruif s ac-
count of the testy Dutchman who, looking through his homemade micro-
scopes, was the first to see those tiny "animalcules" which we call microbes.
The more he looked, the more he found — in the tissues of a whale, the
scales of his own skin, the head of a fly, the sting of a flea. He watched
them attack mussels and so realized that life lives on life. It is doubtful
whether he knew that life must always come from life or that microbes play a
dominant role in disease.

Those were discoveries that were to take centuries and test the abilities
of men like Spallanzani, Redi, Pasteur, Tyndall, Koch. We no longer think
that eels develop spontaneously in stagnant pools, that kittens (without

269

270 THE WORLD OF LIFE

parents) spring from piles of dirty clothes. The idea is so foreign to us that
we hardly believe men could have thought it possible. Yet the classic ex-
periments which disproved once and for all the doctrine of spontaneous
generation were performed no earlier than the last century by Pasteur and
Tyndall. Pasteur showed that water boiled in flasks to which the dust-filled
air was not admitted would never generate life. He showed that flasks opened
in Paris contained numerous microbes, while those opened in the Jura
mountains contained few or none. "There is no condition known today/' he
wrote, "in which you can afErm that microscopic beings came into the world
without germs, without parents like themselves."

Yet somewhere along the road, if we may believe the latest researches, life
and nonlife seem to merge. The story is told in Gray's Where Life Begins.
Here we observe viruses far smaller than anything seen by Leeuwenhoek,
made up of molecules which may be composed of thousands of atoms.
Are they alive? It depends on our definition of life. By some standards they
are, by others they are not. Perhaps further in the direction which Stanley
and others are taking, the answer lies.

The work described in this contribution by Gray is among the most
important scientific investigations of our day. No matter what the results,
however, it is doubtful whether they will resolve the conflict between the
mechanists and the vitalists. The vitalists will continue to claim that there
is something more fundamental than molecules and atoms. And, like
Pasteur in the last century, the mechanists may be counted on for new facts
to meet each new stand of their opponents.

B. THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

Plants and animals differ from one another in myriad ways and the most
obvious is that of size. We do not often stop to analyze this difference, as
Haldane does so amusingly in On Being the Right Size. Haldane is a famous
geneticist, but he is also a writer of charm and wit. If you've ever been fear-
ful that insects might grow large enough to dominate man, or been puzzled
why mice could fall down mine shafts without injury, or wondered why there
are no small mammals in the Arctic, here is your answer. As there are dif-
ferences, so are there similarities at every level of the plant and animal king-
dom. One of the most striking is described in Parasitism and Degeneration
by Jordan and Kellogg. From single-celled plants and animals to vertebrates,
in amazing environments and through amazing metamorphoses, the para-
sites live on others; unable to find a host, they die.

Next we turn to the spectacle of life in individual species. Flowering Earth
is a long, full history of the plant kingdom. Donald Culross Peattie traces
the steps from the first single-celled life which appeared on earth, to the
algae, the Age of Seaweeds, the first plants which grew on land, the fern
forests, the conifers and cyeads, and finally to the modern floras. He tells us

THE WORLD OF LIFE 271

about the function of chlorophyll, the breathing of plants. He shows how
even the iron deposits of Minnesota were formed by microscopic plants.

T. H. Huxley's Lobster helps us "to see how the application of common
sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us
into all the branches of zoological science." He shows us the unity of plan
and diversity of execution which characterize all animals, whethex they swim,
crawl, fly, swing from trees or walk the ground.

We travel from the simplest to the highest in animal life, beginning with
The Life of the Simplest Animals in which Jordan and Kellogg show how
single-celled animals eat, react, reproduce. Secrets of the Ocean, at high
and low tide, and under the waves, are disclosed for us by William Beebe,
with sea worms, shrimps and fishes playing roles. In The Warrior Ants by
Haskins we see many resemblances to man's own wars, much that we can
learn about the human race. Ditmars, known for his work on snakes, and
his assistant Grecnhall introduce us to one of the most exciting of all nat-
uralist adventures in The Vampire Bat. (Eckstein shows us the intelligence
of Ancestors, in apes that pull ropes arid stack boxes, that react emotionally
like men.)

C. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

With the great apes we have reached a stage of development which
approaches that of man, and thinking about apes leads us inevitably to a
consideration of Evolution. Here again is a theory that has changed our
entire way of thinking and in Darwinisms we obtain a brief insight into the
character of the man who originated it. Darwin and "The Origin of Species"
by Sir Arthur Keith, points out that Darwin's masterpiece is still as fresh
as when it was first written. Darwin recognized that variation in nature is
the means by which natural selection can operate. How variation occurred
he did not know. It remained for others to analyze the problem further: de
Vries and Bateson discovered that plants and animals are subject not only to
small variations but also to large and sudden "mutations." And as a result
of these inherited mutations, new varieties are swiftly bred.

It was then that biologists rediscovered the work of a forgotten Austrian
monk. Hugo Iltis, one of his compatriots now in this country, describes
Gregor Mendel and His Work with clarity and charm. These are the basic
laws of modern genetics. With the discovery of the genes and the chromo-
somes, further advances have been made. Their function is explained in
Part Five, in You and Heredity by Amram Scheinfeld, a selection that might
well have been included here, had its emphasis not been so strongly on man
himself.

So much for the main evolutionary thread. But there are important by-
ways. Julian Huxley, grandson of the great T. H. Huxley and himself a well-
known biologist, explores one of them in The Courtship of Animals, tracing
the influence of the theory of sexual selection on our interpretation of ani-

272 THE WORLD OF LIFE

mals' development and variation. In Magic Acres, Alfred Toombs describes
amusingly the effects of the laws of heredity on plant and animal breeding.
Use of our knowledge has made possible such experimental stations as that
at Beltsville, Maryland, "where the hens lay colored eggs, where the tomatoes
sprout whiskers, and the apples defy the law of gravity."

A. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

The Nature of Life

W. J. V. OSTERHOUT

From The Nature of Life

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

AT THE PRESENT TIME ASTRONOMERS PRESENT A
picture of the evolution of the universe which holds the imagination
captive. Some of them believe that all kinds of matter have been evolved
from one original substance, hydrogen, and that out of the material thus
created solar systems were built up. They are able to give us a fairly
satisfactory description of the processes which formed bodies like our
earth. Their account is supplemented by the geologist, who pictures the
progressive changes on the surface of the earth whereby it became fitted
to support life. The fascination of these researches is heightened when
we consider that they lead directly to a question of universal interest
which lies in the province of the biologist, How did life make its appear-
ance on our planet?

To this question an answer was given long ago by Lucretius and others,
who said that life arose out of lifeless materials. This is known as the
doctrine of spontaneous generation.

The adherents of this doctrine believed that life could arise from non-
living materials whenever the conditions were favorable. For a long time
this belief found favor with many thinkers. But the experiments of
Pasteur and Tyndall showed that if all the living organisms in a nutrient
solution were killed, and if it were kept free from contamination by
germs from without, no life subsequently appeared.

In spite of this evidence the doctrine of spontaneous generation was
revived from time to time. One of the ablest botanists of the past genera-
tion predicted that we should one day discover living forms too small to
be seen by our microscopes; these, he said, represent the earlier steps in

273

274 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

the evolution of living forms from lifeless matter. This prediction has
been verified in so far as we now know a considerable number of such
forms (filterable viruses) some of which cause important diseases. They
cannot be detected by the ordinary microscope; they pass through filters
which retain all the ordinary bacteria. But we do not think of them as
lending support to the doctrine of spontaneous generation, since there
is no proof that they can arise from lifeless material.

How then did life originate? Are we not forced to assume that some-
where, at some time, spontaneous generation must have taken place?
Although no such process appears to occur at present we may neverthe-
less suppose that in earlier geological epochs and under more favorable
conditions it might have happened. And if, as Arrhenius supposes, life
can originate on any appropriate heavenly body • and spread thence to
other bodies we have an immense extent of time and space in which to
find conditions favorable to the origin of life. It may be that such condi-
tions have never existed on our planet and perhaps have occurred but
rarely in the history of the universe. It is not impossible, however, that
we may learn of their occurrence, in the past or the present, since the
spectroscope gives us accurate information about the composition of
heavenly bodies and, in the case of distant stars, tells us what they were
like thousands of years ago. If we do not observe on the earth the con-
ditions necessary for the origin of life we may perhaps hope to find them
in some of these heavenly bodies which might differ sufficiently from
our planet to provide the necessary combination of factors.

Arrhenius thinks that spores of bacteria might be carried to the upper
limits of our atmosphere and thence be expelled into interstellar space,
poetically called the "ether sea." There the spores might be driven away
from the sun by the action of light, which might exert on such small
bodies pressure sufficient to carry them to the outermost limits of our
solar system. Thus interstellar space might conceivably be peopled with
spores which could come in contact with any heavenly body that had
reached a stage in its development at which life could be supported.

It has been objected that the spores might be killed by intense cold,
dryness, lack of air, or the action of light. But some spores are resistant
to these influences and it is by no means certain that they could not
survive a long time in interstellar space.

The theory of Arrhenius stands out as a stimulating example of specu-
lative thought. It is inspiring to picture life, taking flight from worlds
outworn to fresh fields in younger planets, and persisting as long as the
universe can harbor it, in cycle on cycle of endless progress. We may
admire this beautiful theory as a splendid achievement of the creative

THE NATURE OF LIFE 275

imagination but we cannot at present prove or disprove its correctness.
If it should one day turn out to be true? it will greatly widen the possi-
bility of finding appropriate conditions for the origin of life.

GROWTH

Leaving this riddle of the origin of life, let us turn to another question
of equal importance. What new factor entered into the universe with the
first appearance of life? We may perhaps put this in a more concrete
form by asking, How may we distinguish the living from the dead?

It may not seem very difficult to answer this question but the matter
is less simple than might at first appear. As an illustration let us take
some dry seeds. Their appearance does not tell us whether they are alive
or dead. Most people if called upon to decide would plant them, and
use growth as a test of life.

If we are to employ growth in this manner it is important to have a
clear understanding of what it means. Growth is often thought of as
comprising the whole development of the organism. Ordinarily the
life cycle of an animal or plant begins with a single cell, which by
repeated division produces a mass of cells. The form of the organism
then changes, and its parts become differentiated so as to perform dif-
ferent functions.

The question now arises, What is essential to the conception of growth ?
A simple illustration will make it clear that growth may go on without
cell division, change of form or color, differentiation, or assimilation of
food. A small, spherical, green cell, desiccated by the drying up of a pool
in which it has lived, and blown about by the wind, eventually falls into
water. Such a cell often remains alive and when it again finds itself in
water begins to grow. No one will deny that this is genuine growth but
it certainly need not possess all the features which we have enumerated.
In the first place cell division may be absent for a long time. Many cells
increase enormously in size and never undergo division. A nerve cell
may grow to be many hundred times its original length without divid-
ing; and it will continue to function for years and finally die without
any sign of nuclear or cell division. We cannot therefore regard cell
division as essential to the conception of growth, though in most cases
it accompanies growth and is advantageous because it provides separate
compartments in which the diverse processes of the organism can go on
without mutual interference.

There may be no change of form or color in the green cell of which
we are speaking, since it may remain green and spherical while growing.
Nor is there any reason to suppose that in general a change of form is

276 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

essential to growth. It commonly occurs but is by no means indispensable.
Nor is it necessary that a differentiation of the organism into unlike parts
should take place in order that a process may be called growth. Such
differentiation is not observed during the growth of the simplest cells,
such as bacteria, which may have at the beginning all the parts they
possess when growth is complete.

Of especial interest is the assimilation of food and the building up of
those substances which are characteristic of each kind of organism. We
know that seeds can grow for weeks in the dark, absorbing nothing
except air and water. Under these circumstances the food which is stored
in the seed steadily decreases. A kidney bean grown under such condi-
tions may reach a height of four feet and gain in weight more than fifty
fold. Yet this great gain in weight is wholly due to the water it absorbs.
Its dry matter steadily decreases during the whole period, undergoing a
process of combustion which results in continually giving off carbon
dioxide to the air. In this way nearly half the dry material may disap-
pear during growth.

It is true that growth must eventually cease under these circumstances
but the fact that it can go on for so long although the plant takes in no
food shows that increase in dry weight is not necessary for growth.

Since we find that growth may occur without increase in dry weight,
change of form or color, cell division, or differentiation, we may ask,
What is really essential to growth ? The answer seems to be, An increase
in size due to the absorption of water. Let us now look into this more
closely.

It is a very striking fact that when dry seeds are planted in moist soil
the dead seeds appear to grow in the same way as the live ones during
the first few hours. We find, however, that a dead seed soon stops
growing while the living one continues. This suggests that the water is
not absorbed in quite the same manner in the two cases. Absorption of
water may occur in two ways, which are known as imbibition and
osmosis. Imbibition is the process which occurs when a piece of dry
wood is placed in water. The water is taken up into minute pores, other
processes follow, and the result is a swelling which, though short-lived,
can develop great pressure. At one time granite blocks were split open
by drilling holes in a straight line and inserting plugs of dry wood. These
were covered with wet rags, the wood absorbed water and the granite
block was split. Careful measurements show that starch may develop a
pressure of thirty thousand pounds per square inch in taking up water.
It is therefore no wonder that a ship loaded with rice is quickly burst
asunder if water reaches the cargo.

THE NATURE OF LIFE 277

In osmosis water is absorbed in a different way. This may be illustrated
by the story of the good abbe who hid a skin of wine in the cistern of
the abbey. When the monks developed an unusual taste for water he
investigated and found to his horror that the skin had burst. The wine
had taken up water through the skin because it contained substances
which attract water (the word "attract" is here used in a somewhat
figurative sense). In the living cell there is a protoplasmic membrane
which corresponds to the skin, and inside this a solution which attracts
water. As water is taken up the protoplasmic membrane is stretched,
and if there is a cellulose wall outside the living membrane it shares the
same fate. The living membrane can be stretched almost indefinitely
because the cell can furnish it with new material so that it can continue
to expand without rupture. At the same time the cell can produce
substances which attract water. It is therefore possible for growth to
continue indefinitely.

The growth of the dead seed is due to imbibition while that of the
living seed is due during the first few hours principally to imbibition,
after that principally to osmosis. We should therefore expect that the
dead seed would soon stop growing while the living one would continue.

Osmosis does not ordinarily develop so much pressure as imbibition but
it is supposed that the pressure it produces in the living cell may reach
three hundred pounds per square inch or even more: this is as much as
is commonly found in steam boilers. It is sufficient to drive ferns up
through macadamized roads and concrete sidewalks and to enable toad-
stools to lift heavy flagstones.

Let us now consider whether there is anything in growth which can
be used as a criterion of life. We have tried first of all to discover what
is essential to growth. Such things as cell division, change of form, dif-
ferentiation, and the assimilation of food may be taken away, and yet
growth may go on for a long time. One process cannot be dispensed with,
the absorption of water. This appears to be the essential thing.

If growth consists of the absorption of water can this serve as a test
to distinguish the living from the dead? As we have seen, absorption
of water takes place by imbibition or by osmosis. Imbibition cannot
serve as a mark of distinction for it goes on in the same way in dead and
in living seeds. If we are to employ growth as a test of life it can be only
on the ground that osmosis is in some way peculiarly characteristic of
living cells. Let us see whether this is the case.

One way of attacking this question is to attempt to make an artificial
cell which will act like the living. We may employ for this purpose two
solutions, A and 5, such that a drop of A introduced into a vessel con-

278 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

taining B will react with it and form a membrane which is impervious
to both A and B, but is permeable to water. We have now what we may
for convenience call an artificial cell. It consists of a membrane in the
form of a rounded sack which completely incloses a drop of the solution
A and which is surrounded by the solution B. If now solution A is more
concentrated than solution B water will be attracted by solution A and
will pass into the artificial cell which in consequence will expand and
stretch the membrane. Under the proper experimental conditions this
may continue for a long time.

We may employ for such experiments a great variety of materials, as
copper salts in a solution of potassium ferrocyanide, metallic salts of
various kinds in a solution of water glass, or tannic acid in a solution
of gelatin. In some cases the artificial membrane expands by repeated
rupture and repair, in others it is steadily stretched without rupture, and
at the same time strengthened by the deposit of new material. The
protoplasmic membrane might conceivably expand in either way. It is
not certain which method is followed.

In both the living and the artificial cell growth is quickened by increase
of temperature. In the living cell there is an upper limit of temperature
beyond which no growth takes place. This seems to be due to the proteins
of the living cell. If we could employ such proteins in the membrane of
the artificial cell we might obtain a similar result.

The rate of growth depends, in the living as in the artificial cell on
the supply of substances within the membrane which can attract water.
In the case of the living cell these are mostly sugars, organic acids, salts,
and so on, and we can employ these same substances in the artificial
cell. In the living cell we often find starch, which takes little part in
attracting water but which may be gradually transformed into sugar
which attracts water actively. In the same way we may place starch in
the artificial cell and have it slowly transformed to sugar and thereby
cause the cell to take up water.

If the artificial cell is placed in a solution which is more concentrated
than that inside the cell, water is attracted from the cell to the outside
solution and in consequence the cell shrinks. This is also true of the living
cell. If it is growing in tap water it can be made to shrink by putting
it into a sugar solution which withdraws water. If replaced in water it
again expands. Since we regard this as growth, the shrinkage may be
looked upon as the reversal of growth. We find that many living cells
may be made to grow and shrink several times in succession, just as in
the case of the artificial cell.

If the outside solution is concentrated enough to draw water out of

THE NATURE OF LIFE 279

the cell it may nevertheless prevent water from going in and so check
growth in proportion to its concentration. Consequently by varying the
concentration we may accurately control the rate of growth.

We might go on to discuss other points of resemblance between the
growth of the living and the artificial cell but this hardly seems neces-
sary. If we accept the definition of growth given above it is clear that
the artificial cell furnishes an imitation which is sufficiently complete for
our purpose. We must therefore conclude that there is nothing in the
absorption of water by the living cell, either by imbibition or by osmosis,
which differs essentially from these processes as found in non-living
systems.

In conclusion we may ask whether life can go on in the absence of
growth. We know that certain things may be temporarily taken away
from living matter without taking away life itself. Is growth one of
these? Certainly the resting seed lives for years without any sign of
growth. This is also true of many animal cells. The suppression of all
signs of growth does not in any way involve the suppression of life.
Even when placed in moist soil with all external conditions favorable
some living seeds remain quiescent for months or years before they start
to grow.

Hence it seems possible to have life without growth and growth with-
out life.

Our analysis of the process of growth illustrates the method which
biological investigation must very commonly pursue. The biologist wishes
to study living matter in the same manner that the chemist and physicist
study their material. His first task is observation, after that he must
analyze in order to discover what properties are essential and what are
merely accompanying phenomena. He need not attempt to explain these
phenomena, for, after all, we can never arrive at ultimate explanations.
But he can attempt to predict and control. The physicist cannot explain
electricity but he can predict and control electrical phenomena. In the
same way the biologist hopes to be able to predict, and control life
phenomena. One method which he finds particularly useful is to make
artificial imitations which closely resemble the phenomena he is studying.
If he succeeds in this he may find the fundamental laws of physics and
chemistry on which life phenomena are based.

7924

The Characteristics of Organisms

SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON and PATRICK GEDDES

From Life: Outlines of General Biology

FROM A COMMON-SENSE POINT OF VIEW THE
apartness of living creatures from non-living things seems con-
spicuous. It appears almost self-evident that an organism is something
more than a mechanism. But when we inquire into the basis of this
common conviction we usually find that the plain man is thinking of the
highest animals, such as horses and dogs, in which he recognises incipient
personalities, in a world quite different, he says, from that of machines,
or from that of the stars or stones. His conviction rests on his recognition
of them as kindred in spirit; but he hesitates when we ask him to consider
the lower animals, down to corals and sponges, and still more when
we ask what he thinks about plants. In such relatively simple organisms
as corals and seaweeds, he detects no mental aspect; and apart from this,
they show him but little of that bustling activity which is part of his
picture of what "being alive" means. Thus, while he was sure that dog
and wheelbarrow were separated by a great gulf, he is not so convinced
about the difference between a coral and a stone. It is, therefore, for the
biologist to explain as clearly as he can the fundamental characteristics of
all living creatures. . . .

PERSISTENCE IN SPITE OF CEASELESS CHANGE

The symbol of the organism is the burning bush of old; it is all afire,
<iut it is not consumed. The peculiarity is not that the organism is in
continual flux, for chemical change is the rule of the world; the charac-
teristic feature is that the changes in the organism are so regulated
that the integrity of the system is sustained for a longer or shorter
period. That excellent physiologist, Sir Michael Foster, used to say that
"a living body is a vortex of chemical and molecular change"; and the

280

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 281

image of a vortex expresses the fundamental fact of persistence, in spite
of continual flux.

Here it is fitting to quote one of the cfassic passages in modern bio-
logical literature, what Huxley said of the vital vortex in his Crayfish
(1880, p. 84):

"The parallel between a whirlpool in a stream and a living being,
which has often been drawn, is as just as it is striking. The whirlpool is
permanent, but the particles of water which constitute it are incessantly
changing. Those which enter it, on the one side, are whirled around and
temporarily constitute a part of its individuality; and as they leave it on
the other side, their places are made good by new-comers. . . .

"Now, with all our appliances, we cannot get within a good many
miles, so to speak, of the crayfish. If we could, we should see that it was
nothing but the constant form of a similar turmoil of material molecules
which are constantly flowing into the animal on the one side, and
streaming out on the other."

The comparison has great force and utility; it vivifies the fundamental
fact that streams of matter and energy, such as food and light, are
continually passing into the organism, and that other streams are con-
tinually passing out, for instance in the form of carbon dioxide and
heat. On the other hand, the comparison has its weakness and possible
fallaciousness; for it is too simple. It does not do justice to the character-
istic way in which the organism-whirlpool acts on the stream which is
its environment; it does not do justice to the characteristic way in which
the organism-whirlpool gives rise to others like itself. No one who believes
that higher animals (at least) have a mental aspect that counts, can
agree that the organism is exhaustively described as "nothing but the
constant form of a turmoil of material molecules." And even if the
mental aspect be ignored, there remains as a fundamental characteristic
that the "constant form" is secured by organic regulation from within.
Life is nothing if not regulative.

Biology has come nearer the crayfish since Huxley's day, and it is
profitable to linger over the fact that the living creature persists in spite of
its ceaseless change. As a matter of fact it persists because of the self-
repairing nature of its ceaseless change. Hence we give prominence to
this material flux.

METABOLISM OF PROTEINS. — Proteins are nitrogenous carbon-compounds
that are present in all organisms, and, apart from water, of which
there is seldom less than 70 per cent., they constitute the chief mass of
the living substance. They are intricate compounds, with large mole-

282 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

cules, which are built up of groups of amino-acids, i. e. fatty acids in
which one of the hydrogen atoms is replaced by the ammo-group NHs
Proteins, such as white of egg, or the casein of cheese, or the gluten of
wheat, do not readily diffuse through membranes; they occur, as will
be afterwards explained, in a colloid state, and although some, e. g.
haemoglobin, the red pigment of the blood, are crystallisable, they are
not known in a crystalloid state in the living body. Though relatively
stable bodies, proteins are continually breaking down and being built
up again within the cells of the body, partly under the direct influence
of ferments' or enzymes.

There are constructive, synthetic, upbuilding, or winding-up chemical
processes always going on in the living organism, which are conveniently
summed up in the word anabolism, applicable, of course, to the synthesis
of other carbon-compounds besides proteins, notably to the formation
of carbohydrates in the sunned green leaf. There are also disruptive,
analytic, down-breaking, running-down chemical processes always going
on in the living organism, which are conveniently summed up in the
word \atabolism — applicable, of course, to other carbon-compounds be-
sides proteins, as, for example, to the breaking down of amino-acids into
fatty acids and ammonia. To include the two sets of processes, anabolism
and katabolism, the general term metabolism is used. It is convenient to
use this term in a broad way, as the equivalent of the German word
"Stoffwechsel" (change of stuff), to include all the chemical routine of
the living body. The present point is that living always involves the
metabolism of proteins; and that this is so regulated that the living
creature lives on from day to day, or from year to year, even from century
to century.

There is intense activity of a simple kind when the fragment of
potassium rushes about on the surface of the basin of water, but it differs
markedly from the activity of the Whirligig Beetle (Gyrinus) that
swims swiftly to and fro, up and down in the pool. The difference is
not merely that the chemical reactions in the beetle are much more in-
tricate than is the case with the potassium, and that they involve
eventually the down-breaking and up-building of protein molecules.
The big difference is that the potassium fragment soon flares all its
activity away and changes into something else, whereas the beetle retains
its integrity and lasts. It may be said, indeed, that it is only a difference
in time, for the beetle eventually dies. But this is to miss the point. The
peculiarity we are emphasising is that for certain variable periods the
processes of winding-up in organisms more than compensate for the
processes of running down. A primitive living creature was not worthy

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 283

of the name until it could balance its accounts for some little time,
until it could in some measure counter its katabolism by its anabolism.
Perhaps it was only a creature of a day, which died in the chill of
its first night, probably after reproducing its kind; but the point
is that during its short life it was not like a glorified potassium
fragment or a clock running down. It was to some extent winding itself
up as well as letting itself run down. It was making ends meet
physiologically.

In the immense furnaces of the stars, with unthinkably high tem-
peratures, it may be that hydrogen is being lifted up into more complex
forms of matter, but on the earth all the chemico-physical clocks are
running down. . . .

In the little corner of the universe where we move, we are living
in a time of the running down of chemico-physical clocks. But the
characteristic of living organisms is that they wind themselves up. . . .

COLLOIDAL PROTOPLASM. — The accumulation of energy in organisms
is mainly effected by storing complex chemical substances, not merely as
reserves in the ordinary sense, like the plant's starch and the animal's fat,
but in the living substance itself in the form of increased protein material.
The chemical formula of egg-albumin, to take a familiar protein, is often
given as Ci428H2244N364O4G2Si4; and this hints at the complexity of
these substances. In the strict sense, protein material does not form
definite stores in animals, though it is a common reserve in the seeds of
plants, but it accumulates as the amount of living matter increases. The
potential chemical energy of the complex carbon-compounds found in
living cells is particularly valuable because the living matter occurs in a
colloidal state. Of this it is enough to say that a watery "solution" holds
in suspension innumerable complex particles, too small to be seen, even
with the microscope, but large enough to have an appreciable surface.
The particles do not clump together or sink because each carries an
electric charge, and like charges repel one another. . . .

SPECIFICITY. — Each kind of organism has its chemical individuality,
implying a specific molecular structure in some of the important constit-
uents, and a corresponding routine of reactions. This is particularly true
of the proteins, and there are probably special proteins for each genus
at least. There is chemical specificity in the milk of nearly related
mammals, such as sheep and goats; and, as Gautier showed in detail, in
the grape-juices of nearly related vines. A stain due to the blood of a
rabbit can be readily distinguished from a stain due to the blood of a
fowl or of a man. More than that, as Reichert and Brown have demon-
strated conclusively (1909), the blood of a horse can be distinguished from

284 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

that of an ass. The crystals of the haemoglobin or red blood pigment of a
dog differ from those of a wolf, from which the dog evolved, and
even from those of the Australian dingo, which seems to be the result
of domesticated dogs going wild and feral. Even the sexes may be
distinguished by their blood, and there are two or three cases among
insects where the colour of the male's blood is different from the
female's. The familiar fact that some men cannot eat particular kinds of
food, such as eggs, without more or less serious symptoms, is a vivid
illustration of specificity. It looks as if a man was individual not merely
in his finger-prints, but as to his chemical molecules. Every man is
his own laboratory. Modern investigation brings us back to the old
saying: "All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of
men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes and another of birds." . . .
To some who have not looked into the matter it may seem almost
preposterous to speak of a particular protein for every genus at least.
But the work of Emil Fischer and others has shown that there is incon-
ceivable variety in the groupings and proportional representations of the
twenty-odd amino-acids and diamino-acids which constitute in varied
linkages the complex protein molecules. There must be a million million
possibilities and more. As there are about 25,000 named and known
species of Vertebrates and about 250,000 (some would say 500,000)
named and known species of Invertebrates, there may readily be
particular proteins for every species of animal, leaving plenty to spare
for all the plants.

GROWTH, MULTIPLICATION, AND DEVELOPMENT

The organism's power of absorbing energy acceleratively, and of ac-
cumulating it beyond its immediate needs, suggests another triad of
qualities — growing, reproducing, and developing, which may be profit-
ably considered together. . . .

GROWTH. — The power of growth must be taken as a fundamental
characteristic of organisms, for it cannot as yet be re-described in
chemical and physical terms. The word is a convenient label for a
variety of processes which lead to an increase in the amount of living
matter, and while there are chemical and physical factors involved in
these processes, we are bound in the present state of science to admit
that growth depends on the veiled tactics of life. Its results are extraor-
dinary achievements, which would be astounding if they were not
so familiar. From a microscopic egg-cell there develops an embryo-plant
which may grow, say, into a Californian "Big Tree" — perhaps three
hundred feet in height and over three thousand years old. A frog is

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 285

about three or four inches in length, its egg-cell is under a tenth of an
inch in diameter; "the mass of the human adult is fifteen billion times
that of the human ovum." In the strict sense growth means an increase
in the amount of the organism's living matter or protoplasm, but it
is often associated, as in a cucumber, with great accumulation of water;
or, as in the case of bone, with the formation of much in the way of
non-living walls around the living cells. . . .

The indispensable condition of growth is that income be greater than
expenditure. A variable amount of the food-income is used to meet
the everyday expenses of living; the surplus is available for growth; and
this must be understood as including, besides increase in size, that im-
perceptible growth which brings about the replacement of worn-out
cells by fresh ones. Green plants are great growers when compared with
animals — the Giant Bamboo may grow a foot in a day — and that is
mainly because they get food-materials at a low chemical level, that is
to say from the air and the soil-water. Helped by its chlorophyll, the
green plant is able to use part of the energy of the sunlight that bathes
its leaves to build up sugars, starch, and proteins, first of course for
its own maintenance and for its growth, thereafter for "reserves," vari-
ously stored for its own future, or that of its offspring. On this highly
profitable synthesis and storage in the plant, the growth of all animals
depends — directly in the case of the sheep and other herbivores, in-
directly in the case of the tiger and other carnivores.

Food is thus obviously an indispensable condition of growth; but
there are some puzzling cases, e. g. the striking growth behaviour of
a single fragment of Planarian worm, without food-canal, and thus in-
capable of ingesting food; yet soon growing a new head and posterior
end, fashioning itself anew into a perfect miniature worm. Here, as in a
germinating seed, there must have been absorption of water and utilisation
of the previous material in a less condensed form.

Another curious form of growth is expressed in the replacement of
lost parts, such as the claw of a crab, or the arm of a starfish; and here
again the body yields supplies. One of the most extraordinary instances
of such replacement-growth is that seen annually when the stag, having
dropped his antlers, rapidly grows a new set, which, in the monarch,
may weigh seventy pounds!

The great majority of animals have a definite limit of growth,
an optimum size, which is normally attained by the adult and rarely
exceeded; so there must be some method of growth-regulation. On the
other hand, some fishes and reptiles continue growing as long as they

286 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

live, just like many trees; and this shows that a limit of size is not
fundamentally insisted on by nature.

When we think of giants and dwarfs, and of the rarity of their
occurrence, the idea of regulation is again suggested. So also when we
observe the occurrence — yet rare occurrence — of monstrous growths
among animals, we see that growth is essentially a regulated increase in
the amount of adjustment of living matter. By what means is such
regulation affected? The modern answer to this question is twofold.
Regulation is partly due to certain hormones (chemical "messengers")
which are produced in "ductless glands" and distributed by the blood.
Thus the hormones of the thyroid gland, and those of the pituitary body,
have, among other functions, that of growth-control. Again, it has
been shown that parts where metabolism is most intense, e. g. the
growing point of a stem, exert a sway or dominance over the growth
of other parts, as we shall see more fully later.

Another feature of growth is its periodicity. All are familiar with the
rings of growth on the cut stem of a tree, which mark its years, through
the well-marked seasonal alternation of spring and summer wood, which
are different in texture. This instance is no exceptional case, but a
vivid illustration of the rhythmic periodicity of life. The same is seen
in the zoning of fish-scales and the barring of birds' feathers, and in the
familiar growth-lines on the shells of the seashore.

Familiarity is apt to dull our eyes to the marvel of growth — the
annual covering of the brown earth with verdure; the desert blossoming
as the rose; the spreading of the green veil over the miles of wood-
land; the bamboo rising so quickly that one can see it grow; the Sequoia
or Big Tree continuing to increase in bulk for three thousand years; the
coral-polyps adding chalice to chalice till they form a breakwater a
thousand miles long; the Arctic jellyfish becoming bigger and bigger
till the disc is over seven feet in diameter and the tentacles trail in
the waves for over a hundred feet. Again, many an animal egg-cell
develops into a body that weighs billions of times as much as its
beginning; and this is far exceeded in the growing up of giants — like
a Blue Whale, eighty-five feet in length, or an Atlantosaurus with a
thigh-bone as high as a tall man.

MULTIPLICATION. — The corollary of growth is multiplication, a term
that we are using here in preference to the more general word repro-
duction, which includes the whole series of functions concerned with
giving rise to other organisms. Multiplication essentially means separating
off portions or buds, spores or germ-cells, which start a new generation.
In the asexual method of separating off large pieces, the connection

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 287

with growth is obvious; multiplication occurs as a consequence of
instabilities which follow overgrowth. As Haeckel said long ago, repro-
duction is discontinuous growth. Its externally simplest form is seen in
the division of an overgrown unicellular organism, yet in the everyday
division of most of the cells of plants and animals, this has been elabo-
rated into an intricate process, which secures that each of the two
daughter-cells gets a meticulously precise half of everything that is in
the parent-cell.

The connection between growth and cell-division is not far to seek.
Spencer, Leuckart, and James pointed out independently that as a cell
of regular shape increases in volume, it does not proportionately increase
in surface. If it be a sphere, the volume of cell-substance or cytoplasm to
be kept alive increases as the cube of the radius, while the surface,
through which the keeping alive is effected, by various processes of
diffusion, increases only as the square. Thus there tends to set in a
hazardous disproportion between volume and surface, and this may set
up instability. The disturbed balance is normally restored by the cell
dividing into two cells. . . .

In cases of sexual reproduction, where germ-cells are separated off to
start a new generation, the relation between growth and multiplication
is not, of course, so direct as in cases of asexual reproduction by fission or
fragmentation. It may be pointed out that reproduction often occurs at
the limit of growth, and that there is a familiar seesaw between feeding
and breeding periods, between leafing and flowering, between nutrition
and reproduction.

The division of a cell is one of the wonders of the world. Bateson
wrote: "I know nothing which to a man well trained in scientific
knowledge and method brings so vivid a realisation of our ignorance of
the nature of life as the mystery of cell-division. ... It is this power of
spontaneous division which most sharply distinguishes the living from
the non-living. . . . The greatest advance I can conceive in biology
would be the discovery of the instability which leads to the continued
division of the cell. When I look at a dividing cell I feel as an astronomer
might do if he beheld the formation of a double star: that an original
act of creation is taking place before me."

In the present youthful condition of biology it is wise to return
at frequent intervals to concrete illustrations. We need the warmth of
actual facts to help us to appreciate the quality of reproductivity which
we are only beginning to understand. In one day the multiplication of
a microbe may result in a number with thirty figures. Were there an
annual plant with only two seeds, it could be represented by over a

288 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

million in the twenty-first year. But a common British weed (Sisymbrium
officinal?) has often three-quarters of a million of seeds, so that in
three years it could theoretically cover the whole earth. Huxley calculated
that if the descendants of a single green-fly all survived and multiplied,
they would, at the end of the first summer, weigh down the population
of China. A codfish is said to produce two million eggs, a conger eel ten
millions, an oyster twenty-millions. The starfish Luidia, according to
Mortensen, produces two hundred million eggs every year of its life.

DEVELOPMENT. — In active tissues, like muscle or gland, wear and
tear is inevitable, especially in the less labile parts of the cells — the
furnishings of life's laboratories, such as the for the most part ultra-
microscopic films that partition the cyptoplasm into areas. When the
results of the wear and tear over-accumulate, they tend to depress
activity and in time to inhibit it; and this means ageing, towards death.
But this decline of vitality may be counteracted by rejuvenescence-
processes in the ageing cells, or by the replacement of worn-out cells by
new ones. In some cases the hard-worked cells go fatally out of gear,
as in the brain of the busy summer-bee, which does not usually survive
for more than six or eight weeks. In other cases, as in ordinary muscle,
the recuperation afforded by food and rest is very perfect, and the same
cell may continue active for many years. Such cells are comparable to
the relatively simple unicellular animals, like the amoebae, which recuper-
ate so thoroughly that they evade natural death altogether. In another
set of cases, e. g. the lining cells of the stomach, or the epithelium
covering the lips, the senescent cells die and drop off, but are replaced by
others. The outer epidermic layer of the skin (the stratum corneum) is
continually wearing away, and as continually being replaced by con-
tributions from the more intensely living and growing deeper stratum
(the stratum Malpighii). Similarly at the tip of a rootlet there is a
cap of cells which are always dying away and being replaced from the
delicate growing point which they protect. From such replacement of cells
there is an easy transition to the re-growth of lost parts. The starfish
re-grows its lost arm, the crab its claw, the snail its horn, the earthworm
its head. From cells below the plane of separation there is in each
case a regulated growth, which replaces what has been lost. We have
already mentioned a very striking instance, in which regrowth is normal,
and in organic and seasonal rhythm independent of any violence from
without — namely, the re-growth which gives the stag new antlers to
replace those of the previous year. . . . The needful renewal of
embryonic tissue is rarely seen, unless there be some recurrent need for it.
Most lizards can re-grow their long tail if that has been snapped off by a

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 289

bird or surrendered in fear or in battle, but the chameleon which keeps
its tail coiled round the branch, has not unnaturally lost this power.
Long-limbed animals like crabs, and starfishes with their lank arms,
have great regenerative capacity, in striking contrast to the compact
and swiftly moving fishes, which cannot even replace a lost scale! The
recurrence of non-fatal injuries is not common among the higher
animals, so their power of regenerating important parts has waned.
Enough of this, however; our present point is that the regeneration of
lost parts illustrates a renewal of that regulated growth of complicated
structure which is characteristic of embryonic development. Out of
apparently simple cells at the stump of a snail's horn, the whole can be
regrown, including the eye at the tip; and this may occur not once only,
but forty times. From the broken portion of a Begonia leaf there buds a
complete plant — to root and shoot and flower. From such reconstruc-
tion there is but a step to the asexual multiplication of many plants and
animals — whether by the bulbils of the lily, the budding of the hydra
in the pond, or the halving of the Planarian worm. When the tail-half
of the dividing Planarian worm proceeds to differentiate a new head,
with brain-ganglia, eyes, and mouth complete, there is an obvious
development — the formation of new and complex structures out of the
undifferentiated and apparently simple. . . .

In his discussions of the characteristics of living creatures, Huxley was
wont to lay emphasis on what he called "cyclical development." Within
the embryo-sac, within the ovule, within the ovary of the flower, a
miniature plant is formed by the division and re-division of the
fertilised egg-cell. The ovule becomes a seed; and this, when sown,
a seedling. By insensible steps there is fashioned a large and varied
fabric, of root and shoot, of leaves and flowers. But sooner or later, after
this development is complete, the grass begins to wither and the flower
thereof to fade. In the case of an annual plant, there is soon nothing
left but the seeds, which begin the cycle anew. . . .

Among animals the egg-cell, in many cases microscopic, divides and
redivides, and an embryo is built up. Division of labour sets in among
its units. . . . Some cells become nervous, others muscular, others
glandular, others skeletal; and so the differentiating process continues.
Hereditary contributions from parents and ancestors find expression,
some of fundamental importance and others relatively trivial; the past
lives on in the present; often the individual shows, in varying degree,
evidence that it is "climbing up its own genealogical tree." Sometimes the
embryo develops steadily and directly into the likeness of its kind, as
in birds and mammals, with only traces of circuitousness, such as

290 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

notochord and gill<lefts disclose — tell-tale evidence of the lien the past
continues to hold on the present. . . .

BEHAVIOUR, ENREGISTRATION, AND EVOLUTION

A third triad of qualities which are distinctive of the living organisms
may be summed up in the words behaviour, registration, and evolution,
in which as in previous triads an underlying unity may perhaps be dis-
cerned.

BEHAVIOUR. — Herbert Spencer spoke of life as "effective response,"
and from the amoeba upwards we recognize among animals the power
of linking actions in a chain so that the result is behaviour — always
purposive and in the higher reaches purposeful. Responses are common
in the inorganic world — from gentle weathering to volcanic explosion —
but non-living things do not show the living creature's power of
reacting in a self-preservative way. Among plants, for various reasons,
such as the fixed habit of the great majority and the enclosing of the
cells in cellulose, there is relatively little exhibition of that purposive
"doing of things" which we call behaviour, but we must not forget the
insurgent activities of climbing plants or the carnivorous adventures
of Venus's Fly-trap and the Sundew.

ENREGISTRATION. — A bar of iron is never quite the same after it has
been severely jarred; the "fatigue of metals" is one of the serious risks of
engineering; the violin suffers from mishandling. But these are hardly
more than vague analogies of the distinctive power that living creatures
have of enregistering the results of their experience, of establishing
internal rhythms, of forming habits, and of remembering. As W. K.
Clifford put it: "It is the peculiarity of living things not merely that
they change under the influence of surrounding circumstances, but that
any change which takes place in them is not lost, but retained, and, as it
were, built into the organism, to serve as the foundation for future
action." ... In various forms this is a distinctive feature of the
living creature.

EVOLUTION. — In the attempt to understand organisms we must en-
visage them as a whole, we must see them in the light of evolution.
Thus it must be recognized as characteristic of organisms that they
give origin to what is new; they have evolved and evolution is going
on. There is variability in the crystalline forms which the same substance
may assume; the modern physicist tells us of "isotopes" like the different
kinds of "lead," which have the same chemical properties, yet differ in
the structure of the nucleus of their atoms; the modern chemist even
assures us of the transmutation of elements, thus not a little justifying the

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 291

medieval alchemist's dream and quest. . . . Yet these are only suggestive
analogies; for the living organism is the supreme, though uncon-
scious, creative chemist.

No doubt there are species that show nowadays little or no variation;
there are conservative living types that seem to have remained the same
since their remains were first buried in the mud millions of years ago,
but the larger fact is variability. In multitudes of cases the offspring show
something new.

What impressions of variability we get at a "show" — whether of dogs
or pigeons, roses or pansies! Here we have, as it were, the fountain of life
rising high in the air — blown into strange forms by the breeze, yet modu-
lated, to its own ceaseless waxings and wanings, by varying pressures
from its source. Two hundred different "forms" or varieties are described
by Jordan in one of the commonest of small Crucifers, the whitlow-grass
or Draba verna\ and these are no longer fluctuating but breeding true.
Again, Lotsy speaks of the bewildering diversity exhibited by a series of
about two hundred specimens of the Common Buzzard (Buteo buteol)
in the Leyden Museum, "hardly two of which are alike." . . .

GLIMPSES OF LIFE

Our discussions of living creatures are apt to be too abstract and cold;
we lose the feeling of the mysterious which all life should suggest. In
our inhibiting conventionality we run the risk of false simplification.
Therefore, at the risk of a little repetition, we devote the rest of this dis-
cussion to what might be called "glimpses of life" — the contrast between
the living creature and a crystal, the quality of vital insurgence, the fact
of organic beauty.

CRYSTALS AND ORGANISMS. — When Linnaeus wrote his famous, yet now
partly outworn, aphorism, "Stones grow; Plants grow and live; Ani-
mals grow and live and feel," he must have been thinking of crystals.
For ordinary stones do not grow — except smaller; whereas crystals afford
beautiful illustrations of increase in size. Suppose, says Sir William Bragg
in his luminous lectures "Concerning the Nature of Things" (1925),
the crystallographer wishes to get a fine big crystal of common salt, he
suspends a minute, well-formed crystal in a solution of brine at a
concentration just ready to form a salt precipitate. That is step one. He
also makes sure of a certain temperature, which he knows from previous
experience to be suitable to tempt the atoms of sodium and chlorine to give
up their freedom "when they meet an assemblage of atoms already in per-
fect array — that is to say when they come across a suspended crystal."
Sometimes the solution is kept in gentle movement so that various parts

292 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

of it get a chance of meeting the nucleus, which, so to speak, tempts them
to settle down — freezing into architecture. Into the physics of this we
need not here enter; our point is simply that in a suitable environment,
with time and quiet, a crystal-unit "grows." By accretion it becomes a
handsome large crystal. Onto its faces other crystal-units are added, and
on the new faces more again, until there is formed — an edifice. . . .

The crystal increases in size in an orderly way; how does this differ
from the growth of an animal or a plant? Is there a real resemblance, or
is it a misleading analogy? The first answer is that a crystal increases in
size at the expense of material, usually a solution, that is chemically the
same as itself; whereas animals and plants feed on substances different
from their own living matter — often very different. This is sound com-
monsense, and yet the edge is taken off it a little by two facts, first that
it is possible to feed an amoeba on amoebae, or a tadpole on tadpoles, or q
rat on rats; and, secondly, it is possible to increase the size of a crystal
when it is placed in a solution of a chemically different substance, which
has, however, the same form of crystallisation.

Then one might lay emphasis on the fact that the increase in the size
and weight of a crystal is by accretion from without, whereas organisms
grow by taking in raw materials, altering these, and building from
within. . . .

But there is another, more general, way of looking at the difference
between crystal increase and organic growth: the one is passive and the
other is active. It is not so much that the crystal grows, as that it is added
to by other crystal units — usually, moreover, in saturated solution. But an
organism actively takes in its food, actively changes and distributes it,
and actively builds with it.

But some authorities who press the analogy between crystals and crea-
tures bring forward another supposed resemblance. If a crystal is broken
there is a neat mending, provided there is the proper environment. There
is more rapid accretion at the broken surface than elsewhere; the repair is
often in proportion. This is very suggestive of the way in which an animal
or a plant replaces a lost part or repairs an injury. If a crystal be broken
into two, each half may form a perfect whole. If a Planarian worm or a
Hydra be cut across, each half usually "regenerates" an entire animal.
But the crystal's "regeneration" is passive, from without, and homo-
geneous; that of the organism is active, from within, and heterogeneous.

Another supposed resemblance that has been emphasised is the power
of lying latent that may be seen in crystal and creature alike. The seed of a
plant may remain dry for a decennium, but sow it and it will germinate.
The egg or the half-developed embryo of an animal may lie unchanged

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 293

for many years, but give it the appropriate environment and it will resume
its activity. Entire animals like "vinegar-eels" may remain without hint of
life for many years; but it is only necessary to put them in their proper
surroundings to see them revive and multiply. Everyone knows how the
spores of microbes may lie low for a long time and be blown about by the
wind, but let one light on a suitable medium and it reasserts its power —
perhaps its virulence to our undoing.

Now it is a similar power of lying latent that enthusiasts claim for
crystals. Thus Dr. A. E. H. Tutton, one of the leading authorities, says:
The virility of a crystal is unchanged and permanent. He pictures very
vividly what may happen to a crystal of quartz detached by the weather-
ing of a piece of granite thousands of years ago. It may be "subsequently
knocked about the world as a rounded sand grain, blown over deserts by
the wind, its corners rounded off by rude contact with its fellows and
subjected to every variety of rough treatment." But if it happen in our own
day to "find itself in water containing in solution a small amount of the
material of which quartz is composed, silicon-dioxide, it will begin to
sprout and grow again." From a grain of sand in such conditions several
typical crystals of quartz may grow out in different directions. "This
marvellously everlasting power possessed by a crystal, of silent imper-
ceptible growth, is one of the strangest functions of solid matter, and one
of the fundamental facts of science which is rarely realised, compared with
many of the more obvious phenomena of nature."

But Dr. Tutton chose a very resistant crystal; what he says of the crystal
of quartz would not be so true of a crystal of common salt, just as what
we said of the vinegar thread worm woufd not hold for the earthworm.
When atoms are very firmly locked together in an intricate space-lattice
system we do not expect them to be changeful. It is not easy to induce a
diamond to change its state. But the persistence of some organisms through
years of latent life is much more remarkable, for they often become dry
and brittle, and thus pass out of the colloidal state which is characteristic
of living matter. Yet they do not die. As for the prolonged persistence
of some organisms when they are not in a latent state, the marvel there
is that they retain their intact integrity in spite of the ceaseless internal
bustle of metabolism. Plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose.

It is certainly a noteworthy fact that many kinds of crystals, not larger
than bacteria, float about in the air as microbes do. And just as a microbe
may set up a far-reaching change when it lights on a suitable medium, so
a microscopic crystal landing in a solution which is in a properly receptive
condition may set up crystallisation. But the differences seem to us to be
greater than the resemblances; for the minute crystal is but a passive peg

294 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

to which molecules attach themselves, while the microbe is an active agent
that attacks the medium and fills it with its progeny.

No one wishes to think of living creatures as if they had not antecedents
in the non-living world. Science is not partial to Melchizedeks. On the
other hand, we hold to the apartness and uniqueness of life. Dr. A. E. H.
Tutton begins his fine book on The Natural History of Crystals (London,
1924), by saying that no definition of life has yet been advanced that will
not apply equally well to crystals, but we have given reasons for not accept-
ing this statement. The living creature's growth, repair, and reproduction
are very different from those of crystals; life is an enduring activity,
persisting in spite of its metabolism; the organism enregisters its experience
and acts on its environment; it is a masterful, even creative, agency. The
crystal, especially the gem, is a new synthesis, compared with the disarray
of the dust; the organism is another and on a different line.

THE INSURGENCE OF LIFE. — It is difficult to find the fit word to de-
note the quality of irrepressibility and unconquerability which is char-
acteristic of many living creatures. There are some, no doubt, that
drift along, but it is much more characteristic to go against the stream.
Life sometimes strikes one as a tender plant, a flickering flame; and
who can forget that one of the Ephemerides or mayflies has an aerial
life of but a single hour! At other times, the impression we get is just
the opposite, for the living creature often shows itself tenacious, tough,
and dogged. In his admirable Introduction to the Study of Trees (Home
Univ. Library, 1927), Dr. Macgregor Skene of Bristol University men-
tions that three carefully measured stumps of the "big tree," Sequoia
gigantea, of California showed rings going back to 1,087, 1,122, and 1,305
years B.C. The actual record for the second tree was 2,996 years and for
the third 3,197, without allowing for some rings that have been lost in
the centre. A specimen of the dragon-tree on Teneriffe is supposed to be
6,000 years old, and a bald cypress near Oaxaca in Mexico, no feet high
with a circumference of 107 feet at breast height, is credited with over
6,000 years. As these giants are still standing, their longevity is inferred,
whereas that of the felled Sequoias is proved by the ring counts. But,
in any case, there is astounding tenacity of life, and, without going out
of Britain, we may find other impressive illustrations. For, as Dr. Skene
says, "it is quite certain that we have many oaks which have passed
their thousand years, and some which may be much older." Another
way of looking at the insurgence of life is to think of some of the extraor-
dinary haunts which many living creatures have sought out. Colonel
Meinertzhagen, speaking recently of the lofty Tibetan plateau, directed
attention to the herds of antelopes and kiangs (wild ponies) that seem to

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 295

be able to thrive on next to nothing! The explorer marked out with his
field-glass an area where he saw a small herd of kiangs feeding, and then
visited the spot. Measuring a space one hundred yards by ten, he gathered
up every scrap of vegetation, and the result was a quaint collection —
seventeen withered blades of coarse grass and seven small alpines — not
enough to feed a guinea-pig! Of course, the kiangs had been there before
him, but there was little but very frugal fare all around. Meinertzhagen,
to whom we owe much information on the altitude of bird flight, saw a
flock of swifts at 18,800 feet. At 19,950 feet he shot a raven which showed
undue inquisitiveness as to his movements; at 21,059 feet> t'ie highest
point reached, he found a family of wall-creepers — dainty little refugees
of the mountains. Facts like these must be taken into consideration in
our total conception of life, for they are surely as essential to the picture
as the semi-permeability of the cell-membrane, or any other fundamental
fact of life-structure. No doubt hunger is a sharp spur; the impelling
power of the struggle for existence cannot be gainsaid; but we cannot get
away from the impression that we must also allow for something
analogous to the spirit of adventure. At all events, the facts show that
while the environment selects organisms, often winnowing very roughly,
there are other cases where organisms select their environment, and often
adventurously. There is a quality of tentativeness in many organisms,
that look out not merely for niches of opportunity into which to slink,
but for new kingdoms to conquer.

THE FACT OF BEAUTY. — No one who studies Animate Nature can get
past the fact of Beauty. It is as real in its own way as the force of
gravity. It used to be spoken of as though it were a quality of the exotic
— of the Orchid and the Bird of Paradise — now we feel it most at our
doors. St. Peter's lesson has been learned, and we find naught common
on the earth. As one of our own poets has said: Beauty crowds us all our
life. We maintain that all living things are beautiful; save those which
do not live a free life, those that are diseased or parasitised, those that
are half-made, and those which bear the the marks of man's meddling
fingers — monstrosities, for instance, which are naturally non-viable,
but live a charmed life under human protection. With these excep-
tions all living creatures are beautiful, especially when we see them
in their natural surroundings. To those who maintain that Animate
Nature is spotted with ugliness, we would reply that they are allowing
themselves to be preoccupied with the quite exceptional cases to which
we have referred, or that they are unable to attain the detachment
required in order to appreciate the esthetic points of, say, a snake or any
other creature against which there is a strong racial or personal prejudice.

296 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

To call a jellyfish anything but beautiful is either a confusion of thought
or a submission to some unpleasant association, such as being severely
stung when bathing. That there are many quaint, whimsical, grotesque
creatures must be granted, to which conventionally minded zoologists
who should have known better have given names like Moloch horridus,
but we have never found any dubiety in the enthusiasm with which artists
have greeted these delightfully grotesque animals; and the makers of
beauty surely form the court of appeal for all such cases.

When we say that all free-living, fully formed, healthy living creatures
are beautiful, we mean that they excite in the spectator the characteristic
kind of emotion which is called esthetic. The thing of beauty is a joy for
ever. The esthetic emotion is distinctive; it brings no satiety; it is annexed
to particular qualities of shape, colour, and movement; it grows as we
share it with others; it grips us as organisms, body and soul, and remains
with us incarnate. Why should the quality of exciting this distinctive emo-
tion be pervasive throughout the world of organisms, as compelling in new
creatures which the human eye never saw before as in the familiar
favourites with which our race has grown up? It is possible that some
light is thrown on this question when we analyse the esthetic delight which
every normally constituted man feels when he watches the Shetland ponies
racing in the field, the kingfisher darting up the stream like an arrow made
of a piece of rainbow, the mayflies rising in a living cloud from a quiet
stretch of the river, or the sea-anemones nestling like flowers in the niches
of the seashore rocks. The forms, the colours, the movements, set up
agreeable rhythmic processes in our eyes, agreeable rhythmic messages
pass to our brain, and the good news — the pleasedness — is echoed through-
out the body, in the pulse, for instance, and in the beating of the heart, as
Wordsworth so well knew. The esthetic emotion is certainly associated
with a pleasing bodily resonance; in other words, it has its physiological
side. The second factor in our esthetic delight is perceptual. The "form"
of what we contemplate is significant for us and satisfies our feeling. The
more meaning is suffused into the material, the more our sense of beauty
is enhanced. The lines and patterns and colours of living creatures go to
make up a "form" which almost never disappoints. . . . We suggest for
consideration the general conclusion that all free-living, full-grown,
wholesome organisms have the emotion-exciting quality of beauty. And
is not our humanly sympathetic appreciation of this protean beauty of
the world inherent and persistent in us as also part of the same world of
life, and evolved far enough to realise it more fully, communicate it tG
each other more clearly?

1931

Leeuwenhoek

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
PAUL DE KRUIF

From Microbe Hunters

HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO AN OBSCURE
man named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious
new world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings, some
ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many of them more im-
portant to mankind than any continent or archipelago.

Leeuwenhoek, unsung and scarce remembered, is now almost as un-
known as his strange little animals and plants were at the time he dis-
covered them. This is the story of Leeuwenhoek, the first of the microbe
hunters. . . . Take yourself back to Leeuwenhoek's day, two hundred and
fifty years ago, and imagine yourself just through high school, getting
ready to choose a career, wanting to know —

You have lately recovered from an attack of mumps, you ask your father
what is the cause of mumps, and he tells you a mumpish evil spirit has got
into you. His theory may not impress you much, but you decide to make
believe you believe him and not to wonder any more about what is mumps
— because if you publicly don't believe him you are in for a beating and
may even be turned out of the house. Your father is Authority.

That was the world about three hundred years ago, when Leeuwenhoek
was born. It had hardly begun to shake itself free from superstitions, it was
barely beginning to blush for its ignorance. It was a world where science
(which only means trying to find truth by careful observation and clear
thinking) was just learning to toddle on vague and wobbly legs. It was a
world where Servetus was burned to death for daring to cut up and
examine the body of a dead man, where Galileo was shut up for life for
daring to prove that the earth moved around the sun.

297

298 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

Antony Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 amid the blue windmills and
low streets and high canals of Delft, in Holland. His family were burghers
of an intensely respectable kind and I say intensely respectable because
they were basket-makers and brewers, and brewers are respectable and
highly honored in Holland. Leeuwenhoek's father died early and his
mother sent him to school to learn to be a government official, but he left
school at sixteen to be an apprentice in a dry-goods store in Amsterdam.
That was his university. . . .

At the age of twenty-one he left the dry-goods store, went back to Delft,
married, set up a dry-goods store of his own there. For twenty years after
that very little is known about him, except that he had two wives (in suc-
cession) and several children most of whom died, but there is no doubt
that during this time he was appointed janitor of the city hall of Delft, and
that he developed a most idiotic love for grinding lenses. He had heard
that if you very carefully ground very little lenses out of clear glass, you
would see things look much bigger than they appeared to the naked eye. . . .

It would be great fun to look through a lens and see things bigger than
your naked eye showed them to you! But buy lenses? Not Leeuwenhoek!
There never was a more suspicious man. Buy lenses? He would make
them himself! During these twenty years of his obscurity he went to spec-
tacle-makers and got the rudiments of lens-grinding. He visited alchemists
and apothecaries and put his nose into their secret ways of getting metals
from ores, he began fumblingly to learn the craft of the gold- and silver-
smiths. He was a most pernickety man and was not satisfied with grinding
lenses as good as those of the best lens-grinder in Holland, they had to be
better than the best, and then he still fussed over them for long hours.
Next he mounted these lenses in little oblongs of copper or silver or gold,
which he had extracted himself, over hot fires, among strange smells and
fumes. . . .

Of course his neighbors thought he was a bit cracked but Leeuwenhoek
went on burning and blistering his hands. Working forgetful of his
family and regardless of his friends, he bent solitary to subtle tasks in still
nights. The good neighbors sniggered, while that man found a way to
make a tiny lens, less than one-eighth of an inch across, so symmetrical, so
perfect, that it showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enormous-
ness. . . .

Now this self-satisfied dry-goods dealer began to turn his lenses onto
everything he could get hold of. He looked through them at the muscle
fibers of a whale and the scales of his own skin. He went to the butcher
shop and begged or bought ox-eyes and was amazed at how prettily the
crystalline lens of the eye of the ox is put together. He peered for hours ar

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 299

the build of the hairs of a sheep, of a beaver, of an elk, that were trans-
formed from their fineness into great rough logs under his bit of glass. He
delicately dissected the head of a fly; he stuck its brain on the fine needle
of his microscope — how he admired the clear details of the marvelous big
brain of that fly! He examined the cross-sections of the wood of a dozen
different trees and squinted at the seeds of plants. He grunted "Impos-
sible!" when he first spied the outlandish large perfection of the sting of a
flea and the legs of a louse. That man Leeuwenhoek was like a puppy who
sniffs — with a totally impolite disregard of discrimination — at every object
of the world around him!

But at this time, in the middle of the seventeenth century, great things
were astir in the world. Here and there in France and England and Italy
rare men were thumbing their noses at almost everything that passed for
knowledge. "We will no longer take Aristotle's say-so, nor the Pope's
say-so," said these rebels. "We will trust only the perpetually repeated
observations of our own eyes and the careful weighings of our scales; we
will listen to the answers experiments give us and no .other answers!" So
in England a few of these revolutionists started a society called The Invisi-
ble College, it had to be invisible because that man Cromwell might have
hung them for plotters and heretics if he had heard of the strange ques-
tions they were trying to settle.

. . . Remember that one of the members of this college was Robert Boyle,
founder of the science of chemistry, and another was Isaac Newton. Such
was the Invisible College, and presently, when Charles II came to the
throne, it rose from its depths as a sort of blind-pig scientific society to the
dignity of the name of the Royal Society of England. And they were
Antony Leeuwenhoek's first audience! There was one man in Delft who
did not laugh at Antony Leeuwenhoek, and that was Regnier de Graaf,
whom the Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had made a corre-
sponding member because he had written them of interesting things he
had found in the human ovary. Already Leeuwenhoek was rather surly and
suspected everybody, but he let de Graaf peep through those magic eyes
of his, those little lenses whose equal did not exist in Europe or England
or the whole world for that matter. What de Graaf saw through those
microscopes made him ashamed of his own fame and he hurried to write
to the Royal Society:

"Get Antony Leeuwenhoek to write you telling of his discoveries."

And Leeuwenhoek answered the request of the Royal Society with all
the confidence of an ignorant man who fails to realize the profouncj

300 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

wisdom of the philosophers he addresses. It was a long letter, it rambled
over every subject under the sun, it was written with a comical artlessness
in the conversational Dutch that was the only language he knew. The title
of that letter was: "A Specimen of some Observations made by a Micro-
scope contrived by Mr. Leeuwenhoek, concerning Mould upon the Skin,
Flesh, etc.; the Sting of a Bee, etc." The Royal Society was amazed, the
sophisticated and learned gentlemen were amused — but principally the
Royal Society was astounded by the marvelous things Leeuwenhoek told
them he could see through his new lenses. The Secretary of the Royal
Society thanked Leeuwenhoek and told him he hoped his first communica-
tion would be followed by others. It was, by hundreds of others over a
period of fifty years. They were talkative letters full of salty remarks about
his ignorant neighbors, of exposures of charlatans and of skilled explodings
of superstitions, of chatter about his personal health — but sandwiched be-
tween paragraphs and pages of this homely stuff, in almost every letter,
those Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had the honor of reading
immortal and gloriously accurate descriptions of the discoveries made by
the magic eye of that janitor and shopkeeper. What discoveries!

. . . When Leeuwenhoek was born there were no microscopes but only
crude hand-lenses that would hardly make a ten-cent piece look as large as
a quarter. Through these — without his incessant grinding of his own mar-
velous lenses — that Dutchman might have looked till he grew old without
discovering any creature smaller than a cheese-mite. You have read that
he made better and better lenses with the fanatical persistence of a lunatic;
that he examined everything, the most intimate things and the most
shocking things, with the silly curiosity of a puppy. Yes, and all this
squinting at bee-stings and mustache hairs and what-not were needful to
prepare him for that sudden day when he looked through his toy of a gold-
mounted lens at a fraction of a small drop of clear rain water to discover —

What he saw that day starts this history. Leeuwenhoek was a maniac ob-
server, and who but such a strange man would have thought to turn his
lens on clear, pure water, just come down from the sky? What could there
be in water but just — water? You can imagine his daughter Maria — she
was nineteen and she took such care of her slightly insane father! — watch-
ing him take a little tube of glass, heat it red-hot in a flame, draw it out to
the thinnest of a hair. . . .

He squints through his lens. He mutters guttural words under his
breath. . . .

Then suddenly the excited voice of Leeuwenhoek: "Come here! Hurry!
There are little animals in this rain water. . . . They swim! They play

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 301

around! They are a thousand times smaller than any creatures we can see
with our eyes alone. . . . Look! See what I have discovered!"

Leeuwenhoek's day of days had come. . . . This janitor of Delft had
stolen upon and peeped into a fantastic sub-visible world of little things,
creatures that had lived, had bred, had battled, had died, completely
hidden from and unknown to all men from the beginning of time. Beasts
these were of a kind that ravaged and annihilated whole races of men ten
millions times larger than they were themselves. Beings these were, more
terrible than fire-spitting dragons or hydra-headed monsters. They were
silent assassins that murdered babes in warm cradles and kings in sheltered
places. It was this invisible, insignificant, but implacable — and sometimes
friendly — world that Leeuwenhoek had looked into for the first time of all
men of all countries.

This was Leeuwenhoek's day of days. . . .

. . . How marvelous it would be to step into that simple Dutchman's
shoes, to be inside his brain and body, to feel his excitement — it is almost
nausea! — at his first peep at those cavorting "wretched beasties."

That was what he called them, and this Leeuwenhoek was an unsure
man. Those animals were too tremendously small to be true, they were
too strange to be true. So he looked again, till his hands were cramped
with holding his microscope and his eyes full of that smarting water that
comes from too-long looking. But he was right! Here they were again,
not one kind of little creature, but here was another, larger than the first,
"moving about very nimbly because they were furnished with divers in-
credibly thin feet." Wait! Here is a third kind — and a fourth, so tiny I
can't make out his shape. But he is alive! He goes about, dashing over
great distances in this world of his water-drop in the little tube. . . . What
nimble creatures!

"They stop, they stand still as 'twere upon a point, and then turn them-
selves round with that swiftness, as we see a top turn round, the circum-
ference they make being no bigger than that of a fine grain of sand." So
wrote Leeuwenhoek. . . .

But where did these outlandish little inhabitants of the rainwater come
from? Had they come down from the sky? Had they crawled invisibly
over the side of the pot from the ground? Or had they been created out of
nothing by a God full of whims? Well, there was only one way to find
out where they came from. "I will experiment!" he muttered.

. . . Then he took a big porcelain dish, "glazed blue within," he washed
it clean, out into the rain he went with it and put it on top of a big box so

302 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

that the falling raindrops would splash no mud into the dish. The first
water he threw out to clean it still more thoroughly. Then intently he
collected the next bit in one of his slender pipes, into his study he went
with it. ...

"I have proved it! This water has not a single little creature in it! They
do not come down from the sky!"

But he kept that water; hour after hour, day after day he squinted at it
— and on the fourth day he saw those wee beasts beginning to appear in
the water along with bits of dust and little flecks of thread and lint. That
was a man from Missouri! Imagine a world of men who would submit all
of their cocksure judgments to the ordeal of the common-sense experiments
of a Leeuwenhoek!

Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of this entirely unsus-
pected world of life he had discovered? Not yet! He was a slow man. He
turned his lens onto all kinds of water, water kept in the close air of his
study, water in a pot kept on the high roof of his house, water from the
not-too-clean canals of Delft and water from the deep cold well in his
garden. Everywhere he found those beasts. He gaped at their enormous
littleness, he found many thousands of them did not equal a grain of sand
in bigness, he compared them to a cheese-mite and they were to this filthy
little creature as a bee is to a horse. He was never tired with watching them
"swim about among one another gently with a swarm of mosquitoes in the
air. . . ."

Of course this man was a groper. He was a groper and a stumbler as all
men are gropers, devoid of prescience, and stumblers, finding what they
never set out to find. His new beasties were marvelous but they were not
enough for him, he was always poking into everything, trying to see more
closely, trying to find reasons. Why is the sharp taste of pepper ? That was
what he asked himself one day, and he guessed: "There must be little
points on the particles of pepper and these points jab the tongue when you
eat pepper "

But are there such little points?

He fussed with dry pepper. He sneezed. He sweat, but he couldn't get
the grains of pepper small enough to put under his lens. So, to soften it,
he put it to soak for several weeks in water. Then with fine needles he
pried the almost invisible specks of the pepper apart, and sucked them up
in a little drop of water into one of his hair-fine glass tubes. He looked —

Here was something to make even this determined man scatter-brained.
He forgot about possible small sharp points on the pepper. With the in-
terest of an intent little boy he watched the antics of "an incredible number

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 303

of little animals, of various sorts, which move very prettily, which tumble
about and sidewise, this way and that!"

So it was Leeuwenhoek stumbled on a magnificent way to grow his new
little animals.

And now to write all this to the great men off there in London! Artlessly
he described his own astonishment to them. Long page after page in a
superbly neat handwriting with little common words he told them that
you could put a million of these little animals into a coarse grain of sand
and that one drop of his pepper-water, where they grew and multiplied so
well, held more than two-million seven-hundred-thousand of them. . . .

This letter was translated into English. It was read before the learned
skeptics . . . and it bowled the learned body over! What! The Dutchman
said he had discovered beasts so small that you could put as many of them
into one little drop of water as there were people in his native country?
Nonsense! The cheese mite was absolutely and without doubt the smallest
creature God had created.

But a few of the members did not scoff. This Leeuwenhoek was a con-
foundedly accurate man : everything he had ever written to them they had
found to be true. ... So a letter went back to the scientific janitor, begging
him to write them in detail the way he had made his microscope, and his
method of observing.

. . . He replied to them in a long letter assuring them he never told any-
thing too big. He explained his calculations (and modern microbe hunters
with all of their apparatus make only slightly more accurate ones!); he
wrote these calculations out, divisions, multiplications, additions, until his
letter looked like a child's exercise in arithmetic. He finished by saying
that many people of Delft had seen — with applause! — these strange new
animals under his lens. He would send them affidavits from prominent
citizens of Delft — two men of God, one notary public, and eight other
persons worthy to be believed. But he wouldn't tell them how he made
his microscopes.

That was a suspicious man! He held his little machines up for people to
look through, but let them so much as touch the microscope to help them-
selves to see better and he might order them out of his house. . . . He was
like a child anxious and proud to show a large red apple to his playmates
but loath to let them touch it for fear they might take a bite out of it.

So the Royal Society commissioned Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew
to build the very best microscopes, and brew pepper water from the finest
quality of black pepper. And, on the i5th of November, 1677, Hooke came
carrying his microscope to the meeting — agog — for Antony Leeuwenhoek
had not lied. Here they were, those enchanted beasts I The members rose

304 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

from their seats and crowded round the microscope. They peered, they
exclaimed: this man must be a wizard observer! That was a proud day
for Leeuwenhoek. And a little later the Royal Society made him a Fellow,
sending him a gorgeous diploma of membership in a silver case with the
coat of arms of the society on the cover. "I will serve you faithfully during
the rest of my life," he wrote them. And he was as good as his word, for
he mailed them those conversational mixtures of gossip and science till
he died at the age of ninety. But send them a microscope? Very sorry, but
that was impossible to do, while he lived.

Those little animals were everywhere! He told the Royal Society of
finding swarms of those sub-visible beings in his mouth — of all places:
"Although I am now fifty years old," he wrote, "I have uncommonly well-
preserved teeth, because it is my custom every morning to rub my teeth
very hard with salt, and after cleaning my large teeth with a quill, to rub
them vigorously with a cloth. . . ." But there still were little bits of white
stuff between his teeth, when he looked at them with a magnifying
mirror. . . .

What was this white stuff made of?

From his teeth he scraped a bit of this stuff, mixed it with pure rain
water, stuck it in a little tube on to the needle of his microscope, closed the
door of his study —

What was this that rose from the gray dimness of his lens into clear
distinctness as he brought the tube into the focus? Here was an unbe-
lievably tiny creature, leaping about in the water of the tube "like the fish
called a pike." There was a second kind that swam forward a little way,
then whirled about suddenly, then tumbled over itself in pretty somer-
saults. There were some beings that moved sluggishly and looked like wee
bent sticks, nothing more, but that Dutchman squinted at them till his
eyes were red-rimmed — and they moved, they were alive, no doubt of it!
There was a menagerie in his mouth! There were creatures shaped like
flexible rods that went to and fro with the stately carriage of bishops in
procession, there were spirals that whirled through the water like violently
animated corkscrews. . . .

You may wonder that Leeuwenhoek nowhere in any of those hundreds
of letters makes any mention of the harm these mysterious new little
animals might do to men. He had come upon them in drinking water,
spied upon them in the mouth; as the years went by he discovered them in
the intestines of frogs and horses, and even in his own discharges; in
swarms he found them on those rare occasions when, as he says, "he was

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 305

troubled witH a looseness." But not for a moment did he guess that his
trouble was caused by those little beasts, and from his unimaginativeness
and his carefulness not to jump to conclusions modern microbe hunters —
if they only had time to study his writings — could learn a great deal. . . .

The years went by. He tended his little dry-goods store, he saw to it the
city hall of Delft was properly swept out, he grew more and more crusty
and suspicious, he looked longer and longer hours through his hundreds
of microscopes, he made a hundred amazing discoveries. In the tail of a
little fish stuck head first into a glass tube he saw for the first time of all
men the capillary blood vessels through which blood goes from the arteries
to the veins — so he completed the Englishman Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood. The most sacred and improper and romantic
things in life were only material for the probing, tireless eyes of his lenses.
Leeuwenhoek discovered the human sperm, and the cold-blooded science of
his searching would have been shocking, if he had not been such a com-
pletely innocent man! The years went by and all Europe knew about him.
Peter the Great of Russia came to pay his respects to him, and the Queen
of England journeyed to Delft only to look at the wonders to be seen
through the lenses of his microscopes. He exploded countless superstitions
for the Royal Society, and aside from Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle he
was the most famous of their members. But did these honors turn his
head? They couldn't turn his head because he had from the first a suffi-
ciently high opinion of himself! His arrogance was limitless — but it was
equaled by his humility when he thought of that misty unknown that he
knew surrounded himself and all men. . . .

He was an amazingly healthy man, and at the age of eighty his hand
hardly trembled as he held up his microscope for visitors to peep at his
little animals or to exclaim at the unborn oysters. . . . Years after his dis-
covery of the microbes in his mouth one morning in the midst of his coffee
drinkings he looked once more at the stuff between his teeth —

What was this? There was not a single little animal to be found. Or
there were no living animals rather, for he thought he could make out the
bodies of myriads of dead ones — and maybe one or two that moved feebly,
as if they were sick. "Blessed Saints!" he growled: "I hope some great Lord
of the Royal Society doesn't try to find those creatures in his mouth, and
fail, and then deny my observations. . . ."

But look here! He had been drinking coffee, so hot it had blistered his
lips, almost. He had looked for the little animals in the white stuff from
between his front teeth. It was j ust after the coffee he had looked there-
Well?

With the help of a magnifying mirror he went at his back teeth. Presto!

306 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

"With great surprise I saw an incredibly large number of little animals,
and in such an unbelievable quantity of the aforementioned stuff, that it
is not to be conceived of by those who have not seen it with their own
eyes." Then he made delicate experiments in tubes, heating the water with
its tiny population to a temperature a little warmer than that of a hot bath.
In a moment the creatures stopped their agile runnings to and fro. He
cooled the water. They did not come back to life — so! It was that hot coffee
that had killed the beasties in his front teeth! . . .

If Antony Leeuwenhoek failed to see the germs that cause human dis-
ease, if he had too little imagination to predict the role of assassin for his
wretched creatures, he did show that sub-visible beasts could devour and
kill living beings much larger than they were themselves. He was fussing
with mussels, shellfish that he dredged up out of the canals of Delft. He
found thousands of them unborn inside their mothers. He tried to make
these young ones develop outside their mothers in a glass of canal water.
"I wonder," he muttered, "why our canals are not choked with mussels,
when the mothers have each one so many young ones inside them!" Day
after day he poked about in his glass of water with its slimy mass of
embryos, he turned his lens on to them to see if they were growing — but
what was this? Astounded he watched the fishy stuff disappear from
between their shells — it was being gobbled up by thousands of tiny
microbes that were attacking the mussels greedily. . . .

"Life lives on life — it is cruel, but it is God's will," he pondered. "And
it is for our good, of course, because if there weren't little animals to eat up
the young mussels, our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for
each mother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!" So Antony
Leeuwenhoek accepted everything and praised everything, and in this he
was a child of his time, for in his century searchers had not yet, like Pasteur
who came after them, begun to challenge God, to shake their fists at the
meaningless cruelties of nature toward mankind, her children. . . .

He passed eighty, and his teeth came loose as they had to even in his
strong body; he didn't complain at the inexorable arrival of the winter of
his life, but he jerked out that old tooth and turned his lens onto the little
creatures he found within that hollow root — why shouldn't he study
them once more? There might be some little detail he had missed those
hundred other times! Friends came to him at eighty-five and told him to
take it easy and leave his studies. He wrinkled his brow and opened wide
his still bright eyes: "The fruits that ripen in autumn last the longest!" he
told them — he called eighty-five the autumn of his life! . . .

That was the first of the microbe hunters. In 1723, when he was ninety-
one years old and on his deathbed, he sent for his friend Hoogvliet. He

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 307

could not lift his hand. His once glowing eyes were rheumy and their lids
were beginning to stick fast with the cement of death. He mumbled:

"Hoogvliet, my friend, be so good as to have those two letters on the
table translated into Latin. . . . Send them to London to the Royal
Society "

So he kept his promise made fifty years before, and Hoogvliet wrote,
along with those last letters: "I send you, learned sirs, this last gift of my
dying friend, hoping that his final word will be agreeable to you."

1926

Where Life Begins

GEORGE W. GRAY

From The Advancing Front of Science

WATCH ALMOST ANY LIVING CELL UNDER A HIGH-
power microscope. . . . Within the delicate membrane of the cell
wall, the protoplasm churns and flows. Perpetually the living stuff is
on the move, and yet it maintains from moment to moment a certain dif-
ferentiation in which we may identify relatively stable parts of the cell.
Central, or nearly central, in this dynamic structure is a region, generally
spherical or oval in shape, that appears more dense than its surrounding
medium. This interior protoplasm is the "cell nucleus," and the sur-
rounding thinner fluid is the "cytoplasm." All types of cells but a very
few, like bacteria and some algae and blood corpuscles, have an easily
recognizable nucleus.

It is possible to puncture the cell wall without killing the cell. It is pos-
sible to remove much of the cytoplasm without killing the cell. Indeed,
the loss will be made good by the manufacture of new cytoplasm. The

308 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

cell, like the tadpole, is capable of a limited regeneration. But if you in-
jure the nucleus, the case is quite different. That inner zone is vulnerable.
It cannot long survive the removal of any part of its substance.

The crucial role of the nucleus may be demonstrated in another way if
we select for experiment those peculiarly endowed units of protoplasm
known as germ cells. These, the egg cell of the female and the sperm cell of
the male, have through the evolutionary ages become specialized as carriers
of life. Some years ago it was discovered that by treating the egg (that of
a sea urchin, for example) with a salt solution, or by pricking it with a
needle, or by other mechanical means, the cell could be artificially stimu-
lated to develop and produce a new sea urchin. You might cut the egg in
two, leaving the nucleus in one half. The half containing the nucleus
could be fertilized, but the other half was sterile. In the case of some
animals, in which the nucleus is a very small part of the egg, the removal
of the nucleus left the egg nearly entire; but an egg so mutilated had no
power of reproduction.

Normally, in nature, fertilization is accomplished through penetration
of the egg by the sperm, which makes contact with the nucleus and merges
with it. The sperm cell is extremely small. It may bulk only a few hun-
dredths the size of the egg. It consists of a bulbous nuclear head and a
short thin trailing thread of cytoplasm. But small as it is, the sperm cell
carries all the pattern of characteristics of the father which are to be
inherited by the child. Might it not also carry the spark of life to one of
those bereft eggs of our experiment — the ovum from which the nucleus has
been removed? This was tried, and it worked. When an egg fragment
consisting only of cytoplasm was exposed to a sperm cell of its species, the
sperm entered the fragment and by this merger supplied the necessary
nuclear material — for thereafter the fragment quickened, began to
divide, and grew into a new individual.

It is the nucleus, then, that is the captain of life. How potent it is, how
packed its small volume, is graphically suggested by H. J. Muller in his
book Out of the Night. Dr. Muller computes that if all the human sperm
cells which are to be responsible for the next generation of the human
species, some 2000 million individuals, could be gathered together in one
place, they would occupy space equivalent to that of half an aspirin tablet.
The corresponding number of egg cells, because of their larger component
of cytoplasm, would fill a 2-gallon pitcher. But since it is the nucleus that
carries the stuff of life, we may consider only the nuclei of these eggs and
reckon that they would occupy no more space than the sperm cells. Thus,
the essential substance of both eggs and sperm could be contained in a
capsule the size of an aspirin tablet.

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 309

It is indeed difficult to believe, as Dr. Muller points out, "that in this
amount of physical space there now actually lie all the inheritable struc-
tures for determining and for causing the production of all the multi-
tudinous characteristics of each individual person of the whole future world
population. Only, of course, this mass of leaven today is scattered over the
face of the Earth in several billion separate bits. Surely, then, this cell sub-
stance is incomparably more intricate, as well as more portentous, than
anything else on Earth."

Some of its intricacy can be made visible under a microscope, by using
suitable stains. Then we see the organs of the nucleus, the minute sausage-
shaped "chromosomes."1 It is not only in the germ cells, but also in the
somatic or body cells, that the chromosomes are found, the structural pat-
tern being repeated in every cell. And the pattern is specific. Every species
of plant and animal has its typical number of these nuclear organs, and
for each there is a standard shape, size, and arrangement. . . .

One of the most productive researches of the twentieth century is the
tracking down of the relationship which these microscopic nuclear bodies
bear to the factor of heredity. The studies were focused on fruit flies.
Thomas Hunt Morgan and his associates, working at Columbia Univer-
sity, cultured the tiny insects (Drosophila melanogaster) in bottles, pro-
vided the optimum of conditions for their growth and reproduction, and
kept exact pedigrees through many generations. As new flies hatched out,
the biologists examined the young individuals for possible changes in
physical character. It was not long before they were finding changes.

For example: the bulging eyes of drosophila are normally red, but occa-
sionally a white-eyed child would hatch out. Morgan and his men were
able to correlate this mutation with a change in a certain region of one of
the chromosomes of the egg which gave birth to the fly. Later they found
nine variations in the wings, and following that came discovery of scores
of variations affecting practically every visible characteristic of the fly —
physical changes which the investigators were able to relate to changes in
the chromosomes. . . .

By these and other experiments a new credence was given to an idea
that had long been held as an inference. They indicate that the chromo-
somes are not simple continuous wholes, but are complex patterns made
of smaller interchangeable units. And these units are the "genes."

No one has ever seen a gene. It is too fine for even the ultramicroscope
to enlarge to visibility. But just as we postulate invisible atoms to account
for the chemical and optical behavior of matter, so we find it necessary to

1 For a discussion of the work of the chromosomes and genes, see "You and Heredity,"
by Amram Scheinfeld, page 521.

310 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

postulate invisible genes to account for the developmental behavior o£
protoplasm. Genes are the unit structures, the atoms of heredity.

Nor is that all. Recent findings bring evidence of a still more funda-
mental role. Experiments show that the injury of genes may be a very
serious event in the history of a cell. The loss of certain genes means death.
And this suggests that the gene's function in the cell activities is not merely
to control heredity, but also to control life.

Discovery of the primary vital role of the genetic unit is the work of
M. Demerec, a geneticist of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,
member of its Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor, Long
Island. For some years Dr. Demerec has been watching the effect of muta-
tions on the reproductive capacity of drosophila. He was impressed by
some experiments completed five years ago by J. T. Patterson at the Uni-
versity of Texas. Dr. Patterson found that out of fifty-nine mutations in
three well-defined chromosomal regions, fifty-one were what he called
"lethals." That is to say, when a fertilized egg carried these changed
chromosomes (in which certain genes were missing), the egg developed
only part way and died as an embryo. The gene deficiencies were fatal to
development, therefore lethal to the fly.

Demerec followed this pioneer work with an intensive search into the
somatic or body cells of the flies. He found that not only were the germ
cells rendered incapable of development, as Patterson's results showed,
but the growing body cells, which by a special treatment had been made
deficient in these same ways, were rendered powerless to grow. And the
cells died — though adjacent body cells, which carried no deficiencies,
showed no such effects. Demerec's later work has demonstrated that
more than half of Patterson's lethals are cell lethals. And by further exten-
sion of experiment and inference the Carnegie biologist arrives at the
conclusion that some of these cell lethals are chargeable to the loss of a
very few genes, possibly only one gene.

How large is this genetic unit? No one knows, and apparently the only
present way of approaching the problem is to find out how many genes
there are in the chromosomes, divide the total length of chromosomal
material by the number of genes, and so arrive at an average value.

The number of genes may be assumed to correspond to the number of
places in the chromosomes at which changes occur. By mathematical anal-
ysis of mutations it has been figured that in drosophila there are about
3000 such places, which means that each cell has at least 3000 genes.

Quite recently a new and more direct method of determining the

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 311

number of genes has been introduced through the work of Theophilus S.
Painter, at the University of Texas. The larva of the fruit fly, like man
and other animals, has salivary glands situated near its mouth, and in flies
these glands are made of giant cells. The cells are many times larger than
the other body cells, and the chromosomes are about 150 times the size of
the chromosomes of the germ cells. This fact has been known for several
decades, but apparently no geneticist thought to search the chromosomes
of these giant cells for fine-structure details of mutations until Dr. Painter
took up the work in 1932. He found that under a certain technique of
staining and illumination, the giant chromosomes revealed themselves as
chainlike structures of varying width made up of transverse bands of
different sizes, each band showing a highly individual pattern of yet finer
parts. The band is not the gene — no geneticist claims that — but it appears
to be individual to the gene, each is the holder of a gene, "the house in
which the gene lives," to quote Painter's picturesque phrase. Therefore,
by counting the number of bands, we should arrive at the number of
genes.

Here we are attempting to separate structures so fine that they approach
the limit of visibility under the most powerful magnification. Early counts
showed about 2700 bands distinguishable, but recently Calvin B. Bridges,
using a more delicate technique, counted 5000 bands. There may be more,
and with further advances in microscopy we may some day be able to see
them one by one. Painter has suggested a total of 10,000 as a guess. And
some late speculations of Muller open up the possibility of an even larger
total.

But, in order to be very conservative, suppose we take Bridges' count as
our basis. If there are approximately 5000 genes to the drosophila cell, then
we may say that one gene is not more than the five-thousandth part of the
chromosomal material. But the chromosomes, in turn, are probably not
more than a hundred-thousandth part of the average cell. The gene then
figures roughly as not more than one five-hundred-millionth of the total
cell material. We arrive at a picture of a mechanism so delicately balanced,
and of a unit so indispensable to the smooth running of this mechanism,
that although the unit represents only the five-hundred-millionth part of
the whole, its elimination is fatal.

What is the nature of this indispensable unit of life? . . .

The view generally held among geneticists favors the particle idea. Dr.
Demerec pictures the gene as an organic particle, and suggests that it may
be a single large molecule. The observed instability of certain genes seems
evidence for this conception. Thus, it has been noticed that the genie pat-
tern responsible for wing formation, which normally endows a fly with

312 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

long wings, will sometimes change to a form producing short miniature
wings, and later shift back to the long-wing structure. These alterations
may be accounted for if we assume the gene to be a large molecule which
suddenly loses one of its subgroups of atoms, and later recaptures and
recombines the separated parts. Other evidence adduced from the study
of unstable genes indicates that when a cell divides to form two cells, the
genes do not divide, but each is exactly duplicated by the formation of a
new gene next to the old one. This method of reproduction favors the
supposition that the gene is a single molecule.

If it is a single molecule, it must be a large one. Organic molecules of
extremely complex structure are known to chemists. Some proteins consist
of thousands of atoms.

. . . The elimination of a single atom may so change the gene structure
that its duplication is rendered impossible. And when gene duplication
stops, cell division in many instances is blocked.

Thus we are led to a view of the protoplasmic world in which a single
small unit becomes critically important. Deprived of this small unit the
gene cannot function; deprived of the gene the chromosomes cannot func-
tion; and with the paralysis of the chromosomes the functioning of the
cell is halted. Cell growth stops, reproduction ceases, life comes to an end.
If life comes to an end with the failure of a gene, may we not infer that
life begins with the functioning of the gene?

Of that functioning we know only three results surely: (i) that in the
process the gene is exactly duplicated, (2) that the gene occasionally
mutates, (3) that genes somehow control and pass on to the developing
organism the physical characteristics which distinguish it. But all these
operations are manifest only in groups of genes. Indeed, we know genes
only as they function in the closely related teamwork of the chromosomes.
But suppose a gene should get separated from its fellows. Imagine one of
these living molecules adrift in the cell fluid, or a wanderer in the body
plasma. Could it function independently? If so, with what effect?

Several years ago B. M. Duggar, of the University of Wisconsin, specu-
lated on this possibility. Dr. Duggar suggested that a lone gene might be
a destructive agent. He pointed to the filtrable virus. Might not the virus
be simply a gene on the loose?

The virus has been known for more than 40 years. It has long been a
candidate for recognition as the most elementary living thing, and
Duggar's suggestion offers presumptive argument for such rating. But first
let us review what is known of the virus. Recent research can help us, for

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 313

within the last 2 years an exciting discovery has been made. Wendell M.
Stanley is the discoverer.

Dr. Stanley is an organic chemist. A graduate of Earlham College, he
spent postgraduate years at the University of Illinois working on leprosidal
compounds, then studied in Germany on a fellowship from the National
Research Council, and in 1931 joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research in New York. In 1932 the Institute opened additional
laboratories near Princeton, and Stanley went there with definite designs
on the virus.

The nature of the virus is one of the key problems of pathology. Such
destructive diseases as infantile paralysis, influenza, parrot fever, rabies,
"St. Louis" encephalitis or sleeping sickness, yellow fever, and certain types
of tumorous growths are propagated by these invisible carriers; therefore
virus investigation is a major project for medical research. Pathologists and
other biologists have specialized on biological aspects, and have turned up
many important facts about the physiological effects of the virus and its
response to various agents. Stanley the chemist was asked to specialize on
chemical aspects — to find out, if he could, what a virus is in terms of mole-
cules, and what the molecules are in terms of atoms: how large, how
massive, how composed, how reactive ?

He chose for his inquiry the oldest known virus, that which causes the
tobacco mosaic disease. This is a pestilence dreaded by tobacco growers,
for if one plant in a field contracts the disease, the infection usually spreads
through the entire acreage, stunting the plants, puckering their foliage,
and causing the leaves to assume the mottled appearance of a mosaic. Back
in 1857, when mosaic disease was first recognized, it was confused with a
plant pock affliction, and not until 1892 did the botanists realize that the
two diseases are different. This discovery was made by the Russian inves-
tigator Iwanowski, and he startled the bacteriologists of his day by
announcing that the juice of infected tobacco-mosaic plants remained
infectious after it had passed through a Chamberland filter.

Now a Chamberland filter is a porcelain affair with pores so fine that if
a pint of distilled water is placed in the filter, many days will elapse before
the liquid percolates through, unless strong suction is applied. There was
no known bacterium that could get through such minute holes. And yet,
the agent which communicated the tobacco mosaic disease readily passed.
Other experimenters confirmed Iwanowski's findings, and six years later
the first filtrable carriers of an animal contagion were discovered in the
foot-and-mouth disease. Since then scores of afflictions affecting plants,
animals, and man have been identified as virus infections. . . .

On the acres near Princeton, Stanley grew thousands of tobacco plants.

314 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

infected them with the disease, later ground up the dwarfed, puckering,
mottle-leafed plants, pressed them to a pulp, and collected the juices.
Somewhere in the gallons was the virus. You could not see it, you could
not accumulate it in a filter, you could not culture it in agar or in any of
the soups used to grow bacteria. You knew it was there only by its destruc-
tive effect. For if you took a drop of the juice and touched it to a healthy
plant, within a few days the leaves showed the unmistakable signs of
mosaic. The virus was there. But how to get at it chemically?

The known ingredients of protoplasm may be grouped in five classes of
substance: metal salts, carbohydrates, lipoids or fatty compounds, and
proteins — these last the most complex of all. There are certain enzymes
which break up proteins. Protein splitters, or protein digesters, they are
called. Pepsin, for example, does precisely that in the stomach, and will do
the same in a test tube. What would it do to the virus?

Stanley put some of the infectious tobacco juice in a test tube, poured
in pepsin, kept the mixture at the temperature and in the other conditions
favorable for pepsin digestion, and at the end of the experiment tested the
solution for infection. It had none. Rubbed on the leaves of healthy tobacco
plants it showed no power to transmit the disease. Obviously the pepsin
had destroyed the infectious principle in the juice. But pepsin digests only
proteins — it has no effect on lipoids, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, and
salts. From this it seemed reasonable to conclude that the virus material is
protein.

There are chemicals which precipitate proteins. These were tried on the
virulent tobacco juice. Immediately certain substances dropped down as
solid precipitates, and it was found that thereafter the juice had no power
to infect. But when some of the precipitate was added to neutral liquid,
the solution immediately became infectious. This plainly said that the
disease carrier resided in the protein precipitate, and Stanley now began a
campaign to trace the carrier down to its source.

He dissolved the precipitate in a neutral liquid, and added an ammonium
compound which has the faculty of edging protein out of solution without
changing the protein. A cluster of crystals began to form at the bottom of
the test tube — somewhat as sugar crystals form in syrup. But these might
not be a single pure stuff, so Stanley sought to refine them. He removed
the crystals, dissolved them in a much larger volume of neutral liquid,
and with the help again of the ammonium compound brought this more
dilute solution to crystallization. His next step repeated the process, but
with still greater proportion of the liquid. In this way, by increasing tfie
dilution each time, the chemist carried his material through ten successive
fractionations and recrystallizations. One would assume that by now the:

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 3l5

substance was pure, that all extraneous materials had been separated out,
also that all living matter had been eliminated — for we know no plant or
animal, no bacterium, no protoplasm, that can undergo crystallization and
remain the same. So the experiment seemed ripe for a supreme test.

Stanley took a pinch of the product of that tenth recrystallization, dis-
solved it in a neutral fluid more than 100 million times its bulk, rubbed a
drop of the solution on the leaves of a healthy tobacco plant, and awaited
the result. The test was conclusive. Within the usual time the plant showed
all signs of an acute outbreak of the mosaic disease. Surely in the crystals
we have the virus. And since, by all rules of chemistry, the crystals have
been refined to the pure state and may be accepted as an uncontaminated
single substance, it seems reasonable to believe that the crystals arc the
virus.

I have watched them through the microscope: a mass of white needle-
like structures bristling in every direction. It is not supposed that each
needle is a virus. Just as each crystal of sugar is made of numerous mole-
cules of sugar, so it is presumed that each of these crystalline spikes is a
cluster of millions of molecules of the protein, and that each molecule is a
single virus.

Stanley's chemical analysis shows that the virus molecule is composed of
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Unlike many other physiologically
active proteins, it contains no sulphur and no phosphorus. Just how many
atoms of each element are present, and the arrangement of the atoms in
molecular architecture, are details still in process of investigation. But the
evidence indicates that the molecules are enormous.

Ingenious physical measurements of the molecules were recently made
by The Svedberg, at the University of Upsala, and by Ralph W. G.
Wyckoff, at the Rockefeller Institute, using centrifuges of the ultra type.
The apparatus is a whirling machine capable of doing better than 100,000
revolutions per minute. Dr. Svedberg's apparatus is made of steel, and is
-driven by a stream of oil pumped at high pressure. Dr. Wyckoffs apparatus
is made of an aluminum alloy, and its turbine is driven by compressed air.
In both machines, the rotating part is housed in a chamber made of 3-inch
armor-plate steel — a safeguard to protect the operator in case of explosion.
If a dime is placed in the ultracentrif uge, and the apparatus is rotated at a
certain velocity, the centrifugal force is so great that the dime presses out
with an effect equal to the weight of half a ton. The purpose, however, is
not to perform trick stunts with dimes, but to separate mixtures of mole-
cules, using a principle long familiar in the dairyman's cream separator. In
the ultracentrif uge this principle is harnessed to the utmost degree of con-
trol. Under the accelerated fling of centrifugal force generated by the

316 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

rotating mechanism, molecules in solution are separated, each is thrown
out with a speed proportional to its mass, and by timing the period
required for its separation the molecular weight and size of any constituent
may be determined. Dr. Stanley sent Professor Svedberg samples of his
crystals, and at the same time supplied specimens to his colleague Dr.
Wyckoflf, and to the test of this indirect weighing and measuring machine
the substance was subjected.

The results are in remarkable agreement. Both Svedberg and Wyckoff
independently reported that the weight of Stanley's crystalline protein is
approximately 17,000,000 (in terms of hydrogen's atomic weight of i).
The largest molecule known up to this time was that of the animal protein
called hemocyanin (which is the pigment of earthworm blood), with a
molecular weight of about 5,000,000. Thus Stanley's find is more than
three times heavier. In size it appears to be egg-shaped with a diameter of
about 35 millimicrons. The corresponding dimension of the hemocyanin
is 24 millimicrons. And a millimicron is 1/25,400,000 inch.

The tobacco mosaic protein thus provides the chemists, the molecular
architects, the microcosmic adventurers, with a perfectly enormous mole-
cule for their exploration: a structure many times more massive and com-
plex than anything heretofore analyzed. It must consist of hundreds of
thousands of atoms, possibly of millions.

It provides the biologists with an indubitable specimen of the invisible
stuff that is responsible for so many human ills, and if we can learn in
intimate detail the ways of the tobacco mosaic virus we may get some
important flashes of information on the ways of the virus of the common
cold and other hidden enemies of mankind. Many points of correspondence
have recently been found, properties in which the plant virus shows char-
acteristics similar to the animal virus. Thus, it is known that the common
cold affects many species of animals. Similarly, the tobacco mosaic virus
affects tomato, phlox, and spinach plants, as well as tobacco. . . .

Another point of similarity between the tobacco mosaic virus and the
virus of animal diseases lies in this: that both may be inactivated and
rendered harmless. Thus Pasteur found that by drying the spinal cords of
dogs which had died of hydrophobia, he obtained a material which was
harmless; and yet it seemed to contain the principle of the hydrophobia
carrier, for a person inoculated with the material gained a certain immu-
nity to the disease. Stanley has found that by treating his crystalline protein
with hydrogen peroxide, or formaldehyde, or other chemicals, or by expos-
ing it to ultra-violet light, he causes its virulence to vanish. When the virus
is rubbed on the leaves of healthy plants, no ill effects follow. And yet the
crystals appear to be the same as those of the virulent untreated protein..

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 317

When they are analyzed by X-ray bombardment they show the same
diffraction pattern, when weighed they show the same molecular weight,
and, most important of all, when injected into animals they produce an
antiserum which when mixed with solutions of active virulent virus is able
to neutralize or render inactive such solutions. There are slight chemical
differences, however, and it is Dr. Stanley's idea that the effect of the
treatment is to alter certain active groups of the huge molecule — to switch
certain towers or ells of its architecture, as it were — but to leave the struc-
ture as a whole unchanged. These experiments with inactivation of the
tobacco mosaic protein seem to promise results that will be helpful to the
human pathologist searching the frontiers of immunization. . . .

But man, whose virus diseases are of animal nature, wants to know of
the virus that affects animals. Has any research progress been made in that
direction? Yes, an interesting beginning, just announced. There is a highly
contagious animal disease known as "infectious papillomatosis" which
affects rabbits. It causes warty masses to grow on the ears and other parts
of its victims, and has been attributed to a filtrable virus carrier. This
disease was first described by R. E. Shope; and recently Wyckoff and
J. W. Beard obtained some of the warty tissue from Dr. Shope, ground it
up, made a solution of it, and subjected this solution to the new technique
of the ultracentrifuge. In this way they isolated a heavy protein which
when tested on healthy rabbits immediately communicated the disease.
But rabbits frequently develop warts which are not infectious, and so as a
further test the investigators obtained some of this noninfectious warty
tissue, and subjected it to the same treatment. They were unable to obtain
from this solution any heavy protein, though repeated trials were made.
Apparently the giant molecules flung out of the solution of the infectious
tissue are a \ irus which is not presen in other warts. And by weight and
measurement the wart virus proves to be a tremendous molecular structure
weighing something more than 20,000,000 and measuring about 40 milli-
microns in diameter. Thus the first animal virus to be isolated is a larger,
more massive, and presumably a more complex molecule than that of the
first discovered plant virus, the carrier of tobacco mosaic. But all our
evidence points to many similarities among these various disease-carrying
substances, and very many lines of research are now being pushed with
the tobacco mosaic protein on the idea that it is not only a virus but a
representative species of the whole virus family, both plant and animal.

Ic it alive? Stanley reminds you that it can be crystallized, a property
that we think of as purely inanimate and wholly chemical. He points to
the additional fact that it has not been cultured in a test tube. This would
seem to say that it is not a bacterium. A few bacteria placed in a nutrient

318 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

soup will rapidly multiply into uncounted millions, but the crystalline
protein shows no growth behavior in a glass vessel, no metabolism, no
reproduction.

And yet, observe what happens when it comes in contact with the inner
tissue of a tobacco plant or other vegetable host. Instantly the molecules
being to multiply. An almost imperceptible particle of a crystal will infect
a plant, and in a few days the disease will spread through a field, producing
an amount of virus millions of times that of the original. It exhibits a
fecund ability to propagate itself, to extend its occupancy of space and
time at the expense of its environment. Is not this a characteristic of living
things?

Perhaps the virus is a molecule of double personality, alive and yet not
alive — animated by its environment when that environment is specific to
its nature, but passive in any other environment. The discovery of this
substance and the elucidation of its properties is one of the most important
biological advances of our century.

The tobacco mosaic protein has certain apparent points of corrrespond-
ence with the gene. The two appear to be of approximately the same order
of size. Both are molecules that in certain surroundings undergo duplica-
tion. Both suspend this reproductive faculty over long periods of time
without losing the capacity to call it into action when conditions are
favorable. The quiescence of genes in an unfertilized egg or in the cells
of a resting seed, and the inactivity of the virus when stored in a bottle,
are examples of the last-mentioned characteristic.

There is still another parallel. The gene, as we know, is sometimes
unstable. Stanley has found a somev* hat similar behavior in his crystalline
protein. The common form of its disease is known as "tobacco" mosaic,
and produces a green mottling of leaves. Recently there was discovered
another strain of the disease which has been named "masked/* and a still
more virulent form known as "acuba" which shows a yellow mottling.
The crystals of acuba strain are larger, its solution is more silky and
opalescent, its solubility is lower, and the ultracentrifuge shows that its
molecules are actually larger than those of the common tobacco mosaic —
they weigh nearly as much as the giant molecules of the rabbit wart dis-
ease, approximately 20,000,000. Now the strange finding of recent experi-
ment is this: a tobacco plant suffering from the common form of the
mosaic disease may suddenly change to the more virulent acuba form.
Apparently something happens by which the smaller molecules of 17,000,-
ooo weight attach other molecular groups to themselves to form particles

WHERE LIFE BEGINS 319

of 20,000*000 weight, and these combinations take place between just the
right groupings to produce the acuba effect. In a sense, it is a synthesis.
Also it suggests the important property of individuality. Just as each gene,
or at least certain genes, seems to carry an individual pattern to control the
future development of its organism, so does the molecule of the mosaic
disease possess a personality, a nature individual to its structure. . . .

Oscar Riddle, of the Department of Genetics of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington, noting some of these parallels, is inclined to believe that
in one respect the gene represents a higher order of organization than the
virus. He points to the teamwork of the genes in the chromosomes1 as
apparently an essential relationship. All the evidence goes to show that the
gene must be in association with its fellow genes in order to duplicate, and
Dr. Riddle doubts if a single gene alone can perform any function. Indeed,
he questions if an isolated gene can be called alive — which is precisely
what Stanley questions of his crystalline protein.

But this leads to another question. How "live" is alive?

. . . Perhaps the nearest we can come to a definition is to say that life is
a stage in the organization of matter. The ascent of life is a hierarchy of
organizations continually becoming more complex and more versatile.
And so with the ascent of matter, from the single electron or proton to
the numerous and enormously complicated colony of electrical particles
which make up the bacterium — it too is a hierarchy of continually
increasing complexity, of relationships, of organization.

Protons and neutrons, with their encircling electrons, associate together
to form atoms, but their organization is too primitive to permit any
behavior recognizable as life. The atoms, in their turn, group to form
molecules of simple compounds — water, salts, carbon oxides — but again
the grouping is too limited to operate in ways that class as animate. From
these simple molecules more complicated ones are synthesized in nature's
unresting crucible, sugars and other carbohydrates, fats and more intricate
hydrocarbons. And somehow, in the melee, atoms get joined together in
the distinctive patterns known as catalysts, of which the enzymes are a
special class. The primitive catalysts may fabricate the first amino acids.
Out of these essential acids they build the first- proteins, simple ones at
first. Proteins associate with other proteins, eventually they join as sub-
groupings of larger molecules to form what we imagine to be the first
genes, and chains of these giant molecules line up or interweave and inter-
link as chromosomes. And so specialization develops, coordination evolves,

aSee Scheinfeld.

320 THE RIDDLE OF LIFE

the ability to duplicate the pattern, to divide, to multiply, to enter into a
dynamic equilibrium of continually moving material and forces — life!

Just where life first appears in this supposed sequence is beyond charting.
But perhaps it is not far amiss to think of the turning point as being
reached with the emergence of the protein-building catalyst. The gene
may be the most primitive living unit. The virus may be the most primitive
predator on life. But the presumption is strong that neither of these organ-
izations antedates the selective, assembling, organizing presence of the
enzyme. The enzyme may not be life, but it seems to be a precursor of
life. And whenever it becomes active may be the place where life begins.

*937

B THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

On Being the Right Size

J. B. S. HALDANE

From Possible Worlds

HPHE MOST OBVIOUS DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
-**• different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the
zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large text-
book of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger
than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though
some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the
whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a
hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal
there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably car-
ries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man
sixty feet high — about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the
illustrated Pilgrim's Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not
only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as
thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty
to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only
a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant
bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of
human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the
human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every
time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in
the picture I remember. But it lessens one's respect for Christian and Jack
the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature
with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it
does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the
rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area

321

322 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its legs
obliquely to gain stability, like the giraffe. I mention these two beasts
because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both
are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and
Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no
dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and,
on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided
that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse
splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is propor-
tional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length,
breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth,
but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the
case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving
force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger,
and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for
elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But
there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a
mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries
with him a film of water of about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness.
This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own
weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as
everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a
very serious position indeed. An insect going for a drink is in as great
danger as a man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once
falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water — that is to say, gets
wet — it is likely to remain so until it drowns. A few insects, such as water-
beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away from their
drink by means of a long proboscis.

Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. They have to pump
their blood to greater heights than a man, and therefore, require a larger
blood pressure and tougher blood-vessels. A great many men die from
burst arteries, especially in the brain, and this danger is presumably still
greater for an elephant or a giraffe. But animals of all kinds find difficul-
ties in size for the following reason. A typical small animal, say a micro-
scopic worm or rotifer, has a smooth skin through which all the oxygen
it requires can soak in, a straight gut with sufficient surface to absorb its
food, and a single kidney. Increase its dimensions tenfold in every direc-
tion, and its weight is increased a thousand times, so that if it is to use its
muscles as efficiently as its miniature counterpart, it will need a thousand

ON BEING THE RIGHT SIZE 323

times as much food and oxygen per day and will excrete a thousand
times as much of waste products.

Now if its shape is unaltered its surface will be increased only a
hundredfold, and ten times as much oxygen must enter per minute
through each square millimetre of skin, ten times as much food through
each square millimetre of intestine. When a limit is reached to their
absorptive powers their surface has to be increased by some special
device. For example, a part of the skin may be drawn out into tufts to
make gills or pushed in to make lungs, thus increasing the oxygen-
absorbing surface in proportion to the animal's bulk. A man, for example,
has a hundred square yards of lung. Similarly, the gut, instead of being
smooth and straight, becomes coiled and develops a velvety surface, and
other organs increase in complication. The higher animals are not larger
than the lower because they are more complicated. They are more com-
plicated because they are larger. Just the same is true of plants. The
simplest plants, such as the green algae growing in stagnant water or on
the bark of trees, are mere round cells. The higher plants increase their
surface by putting out leaves and roots. Comparative anatomy is largely
the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume.

Some of the methods of increasing the surface are useful up to a point,
but not capable of a very wide adaptation. For example, while vertebrates
carry the oxygen from the gills or lungs all over the body in the blood,
insects take air directly to every part of their body by tiny blind tubes
called tracheae which open to the surface at many different points. Now,
although by their breathing movements they can renew the air in the
outer part of the tracheal system, the oxygen has to penetrate the finer
branches by means of diffusion. Gases can diffuse easily through very
small distances, not many times larger than the average length travelled
by a gas molecule between collisions with other molecules. But when such
vast journeys — from the point of view of a molecule — as a quarter of an
inch have to be made, the process becomes slow. So the portions of an in-
sect's body more than a quarter of an inch from the air would always be
short of oxygen. In consequence hardly any insects are much more than
half an inch thick. Land crabs are built on the same general plan as insects,
but are much clumsier. Yet like ourselves they carry oxygen around in
their blood, and are therefore able to grow far larger than any insects. If
the insects had hit on a plan for driving air through their tissues instead of
letting it soak in, they might well have become as large as lobsters, though
other considerations would have prevented them from becoming as
large as man.

Exactly the same difficulties attach to flying. It is an elementary principle

324 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

of aeronautics that the minimum speed needed to keep an aeroplane of a
given shape in the air varies as the square root of its length. If its linear
dimensions are increased four times, it must fly twice as fast. Now the
power needed for the minimum speed increases more rapidly than the
weight of the machine. So the larger aeroplane, which weighs sixty-four
times as much as the smaller, needs one hundred and twenty-eight times
its horsepower to keep up. Applying the same principles to the birds, we
find that the limit to their size is soon reached. An angel whose muscles
developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a
pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the
muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its
legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts. Actually a large bird such as
an eagle or kite does not keep in the air mainly by moving its wings. It is
generally to be seen soaring, that is to say balanced on a rising column of
air. And even soaring becomes more and more difficult with increasing
size. Were this not the case eagles might be as large as tigers and as
formidable to man as hostile aeroplanes.

But it is time that we pass to some of the advantages of size. One of the
most obvious is that it enables one to keep warm. All warm-blooded
animals at rest lose the same amount of heat from a unit area of skin, for
which purpose they need a food-supply proportional to their surface and
not to their weight. Five thousand mice weigh as much as a man. Their
combined surface and food or oxygen consumption are about seventeen
times a man's. In fact a mouse eats about one quarter its own weight of
food every day, which is mainly used in keeping it warm. For the same
reason small animals cannot live in cold countries. In the arctic regions
there are no reptiles or amphibians, and no small mammals. The smallest
mammal in Spitzbergen is the fox. The small birds fly away in winter,
while the insects die, though their eggs can survive six months or more
of frost. The most successful mammals are bears, seals, and walruses.

Similarly, the eye is a rather inefficient organ until it reaches a large
size. The back of the human eye on which an image of the outside world
is thrown, and which corresponds to the film of a camera, is composed of
a mosaic of 'rods and cones' whose diameter is little more than a length
of an average light wave. Each eye has about a half a million, and for
two objects to be distinguishable their images must fall on separate rods
or cones. It is obvious that with fewer but larger rods and cones we should
see less distinctly. If they were twice as broad two points would have to
be twice as far apart before we could distinguish them at a given distance.
But if their size were diminished and their number increased we should
see no better. For it is impossible to form a definite image smaller than a

ON BEING THE RIGHT SIZE 325

wave-length of light. Hence a mouse's eye is not a small-scale model of a
human eye. Its rods and cones are not much smaller than ours, and there-
fore there are far fewer of them. A mouse could not distinguish one
human face from another six feet away. In order that they should be of
any use at all the eyes of small animals have to be much larger in pro-
portion to their bodies than our own. Large animals on the other hand
only require relatively small eyes, and those of the whale and elephant
are little larger than our own.

For rather more recondite reasons the same general principle holds true
of the brain. If we compare the brain-weights of a set of very similar
animals such as the cat, cheetah, leopard, and tiger, we find that as we
quadruple the body-weight the brain-weight is only doubled. The larger
animal with proportionately larger bones can economize on brain, eyes,
and certain other organs.

Such are a very few of the considerations which show that for every
type of animal there is an optimum size. Yet although Galileo demon-
strated the contrary more than three hundred years ago, people still
believe that if a flea were as large as a man it could jump a thousand feet
into the air. As a matter of fact the height to which an animal can jump
is more nearly independent of its size than proportional to it. A flea can
jump about two feet, a man about five. To jump a given height, if we
neglect the resistance of the air, requires an expenditure of energy pro-
portional to the jumper's weight. But if the jumping muscles form a con-
stant fraction of the animal's body, the energy developed per ounce of
muscle is independent of the size, provided it can be developed quickly
enough in the small animal. As a matter of fact an insect's muscles, al-
though they can contract more quickly than our own, appear to be less
efficient; as otherwise a flea or grasshopper could rise six feet into the air.

1928

Parasitism and Degeneration

DAVID STARR JORDAN AND
VERNON LYMAN KELLOGG

From Evolution and Animal Life

TERM PARASITISM, AS WELL AS THE TERM
degeneration, cannot be very rigidly defined. To prey upon the bodies
of other animals is the common habit of many creatures. If the animals
which live in this way are free, chasing or lying in wait for or snaring
their prey, we speak of them in general as predatory animals. But if they
attach themselves to the body of their prey or burrow into it, and are
carried about by it, live on or in it, then we call them parasites. And the
difference in habit between a lion and an intestinal worm is large enough
and marked enough to make very clear to us what is meant when we
speak of one as predatory and the other as a parasite. But how shall we
class the lamprey, that swims about until it finds a fish to which it clings,
while sucking away its blood ? It lives mostly free, hunting its prey, clinging
to it for a while, and is carried about by it. Closely related to the lampreys
are the hag fishes, marine eel-like fishes that attach themselves by a sucker-
like mouth to living fishes and gradually scrape and eat their way into the
abdominal cavity of the host. These "hags" or "borers" approach more
nearly to the condition of an internal parasite than any other vertebrate.
And what about the flea? In its immature life it lives as a white grub or
larva in the dust of cracks and crevices, of floors and cellars and heaps of
debris; here it pupates, and finally changes into the active leaping blood-
sucking adult which finds its way to the body of some mammal and clings
there sucking blood. But it can jump off and hunt other prey; it leaves the
host body entirely to lay its eggs, and yet it feeds as a parasite, at least it
conforms to the definition of parasite in the essential fact of being carried
about on or in the host body, while feeding at the host's expense. . . .

The bird lice which infest the bodies of all kinds of birds and are found
especially abundant on domestic fowls, live upon the outside of the bodies

326

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 327

of their hosts, feeding upon the feathers and dermal scales. They are
examples of external parasites. Other examples are fleas and ticks, and the
crustaceans called fish lice and whale lice, which are attached to marine
animals. On the other hand, almost all animals are infested by certain
parasitic worms which live in the alimentary canal, like the tapeworm, or
imbedded in the muscles, like the trichina. These are examples of internal
parasites. Such parasites belong mostly to the class of worms, and some
of them are very injurious, sucking the blood from the tissues of the host,
while others feed solely on the partly digested food. There are also para-
sites that live partly within and partly on the outside of the body, like the
Sacculina, which lives on various kinds of crabs. The body of the Sacculina
consists of a soft sac which lies on the outside of the crab's body, and of a
number of long, slender rootlike processes which penetrate deeply into the
crab's body, and take up nourishment from within. The Sacculina is itself
a crustacean or crablike creature. The classification of parasites as external
and internal is purely arbitrary, but it is often a matter of convenience.

Some parasites live for their whole lifetime on or in the body of the
host, as is the case with the bird lice. Their eggs are laid on the feathers
of the bird host; the young when hatched remain on the bird during
growth and development, and the adults only rarely leave the body,
usually never. These may be called permanent parasites. On the other
hand, fleas leap off or on a dog apparently as caprice dictates; or, as in
other cases, the parasite may pass some definite part of its life as a free
nonparasitic organism, attaching itself, after development, to some animal,
and remaining there for the rest of its life. These parasites may be called
temporary parasites. But this grouping or classification, like that of the
external and internal parasites, is simply a matter of convenience, and does
not indicate at all any blood relationship among the members of any one
group.

Some parasites are so specialized in habit and structure that they are
wholly unable to go through their life history, or to maintain themselves,
except in a single fixed way. They are dependent wholly on one particular
kind of host, or on a particular series of hosts, part of their ^ life being
passed in one and another part in one or more other so-called intermediate
hosts. These parasitic species are called obligate parasites, while others with
less definite, more flexible requirements in regard to their mode of devel-
opment and life are called facultative parasites. These latter may indeed
be able to go through life as free-living, nonparasitic animals, although,
with opportunity, they live parasitically.

In nearly all cases the body of a parasite is simpler in structure than the
body of other animals which are closely related to the parasite— that is,

328 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

animals that live parasitically have simpler bodies than animals that live
free active lives, competing for food with the other animals about them.
This simplicity is not primitive, but results from the loss or atrophy of the
structures which the mode of life renders useless. Many parasites are
attached firmly to their host, and do not move about. They have no need
of the power of locomotion. They are carried by their host. Such parasites
are usually without wings, legs, or other locomotory organs. Because they
have given up locomotion they have no need of organs of orientation,
those special sense organs like eyes and ears and feelers which serve to
guide and direct the moving animal; and most nonlocomotory parasites
will be found to have no eyes, nor any of the organs of special sense
which are accessory to locomotion and which serve for the detection of
food or of enemies. Because these important organs, which depend for
their successful activity on a highly organized nervous system, are lacking,
the nervous system of parasites is usually very simple and undeveloped.
Again, because the parasite usually has for its sustenance the already
digested highly nutritious food elaborated by its host, most parasites have
a very simple alimentary canal, or even no alimentary canal at all. Finally,
as the fixed parasite leads a wholly sedentary and inactive life, the breaking
down and rebuilding of tissue in its body go on very slowly and in mini-
mum degree, and there is no need of highly developed respiratory and
circulatory organs, so that most fixed parasites have these systems of organs
in simple condition. Altogether the body of a fixed, permanent parasite
is so simplified and so wanting in all those special structures which char-
acterize the higher, active, complex animals, that it often presents a very
different appearance from those animals with which we know it to be
nearly related.

The simplicity of parasites does not indicate that they belong to the
groups of primitive simple animals. Parasitism is found in the whole
range of animal life, from primitive to highest, although the vertebrate
animals include very few parasites and these of little specialization of
habit. But their simplicity is something that has resulted from their mode
of life. It is the result of a change in the body structure which we can
often trace in the development of the individual parasite. Many parasites
in their young stages are free, active animals with a better or more complex
body than they possess in their fully developed or adult stage. The sim-
plicity of parasites is the result of degeneration— a degeneration that has
been brought about by their adoption of a sedentary, non-competitive
parasitic life. And this simplicity of degeneration, and the simplicity of
primitiveness should be sharply distinguished. Animals that are primitively
simple have had only simple ancestors; animals that are simple by

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 329

degeneration often have had highly organized, complex ancestors. And
while in the life history or development of a primitively simple animal all
the young stages are simpler than the adult, in a degenerate animal the
young stages may be, and usually are, more complex and more highly
organized than the adult stage.

In the few examples of parasitism (selected from various animal groups)
that are described in the following pages all these general statements are
illustrated.

In the intestines of crayfishes, centipedes, and several kinds of insects
may often be found certain one-celled animals (Protozoa) which are living
as parasites. Their food, which they take into their minute body by absorp-
tion, is the intestinal fluid in which they lie. These parasitic Protozoa
belong to the genus Gregarina. . . . There are, besides Gregarina, many
other parasitic one-celled animals, several kinds living inside the cells of
their host's body. Several kinds of these have been proved to be the causal
agents of serious human diseases. Conspicuous among these are the minute
parasitic Sporozoa which are the actual cause of the malarial and similar
fevers that rack ihe human body in nearly all parts of the world. . . r

When a mosquito (at least of a certain kind) sucks blood from a
malarial patient the blood parasites are of course taken in also and
deposited in the stomach where digestion of the blood begins. Now when
the zygotes [resting egg cells] are formed in the mosquito's stomach they
do not remain lying in the stomach cavity but move to the wall of the
stomach and partially penetrate it. As many as five hundred zygotes have
been found in the stomach walls of a single mosquito. The zygote now
increases rapidly in size, becoming a perceptible nodule on the outer side
of the stomach wall, but soon its nucleus and protoplasm begin to break
up by repeated division (the parts all being held together, however, in the
wall of the zygote), and by the end of the twelfth or fourteenth day the
zygote's protoplasm may have become divided into ten thousand minute
sporozoites. The zygote wall now breaks down, thus releasing the thou-
sands of active little sporozoites into the general body cavity of the mos-
quito. This cavity is filled with flowing blood plasm — insects 'do not have
a closed but an almost completely open circulatory system — and swim-
ming about in this plasm the sporozoites soon make their way forward
and into the salivary glands of the mosquito. Now when the insect pierces
a human being to suck blood, it injects a certain amount of salivary fluid
into the wound (presumably to keep the blood from clotting at the punc-
ture) and with this fluid go many of the sporozoites. Thus a new infection
»f malaria is made. The sporozoites may lie in the salivary glands for
several weeks, and so for the whole time from twelve to fourteen days

330 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

after the mosquito has become infected with the malarial parasite by
sucking blood from a malarial patient until the sporozoites in the salivary
glands finally die, it is a means of the dissemination of the disease. There
can be no malaria without mosquitoes to propagate and disseminate it, and
yet no mosquitoes can propagate and disseminate malaria without having
access to malarial patients. . . .

In the great branch or phylum of flatworms, that group of animals which
of all the principal animal groups is widest in its distribution, perhaps a
majority of the species are parasites. Instead of being the exception, the
parasitic life is the rule among these worms. Of the three classes into which
the flatworms are divided, almost all of the members of two of the classes
are parasites. The common tapeworm, which lives parasitically in the
intestine of man, is a good example of one of these classes. It has the form
of a narrow ribbon, which may attain the length of several yards, attached
at one end to the wall of the intestine, the remainder hanging freely in the
interior. Its body is composed of segments or serially arranged parts, of
which there are about eight hundred and fifty altogether. It has no mouth
nor alimentary canal. It feeds simply by absorbing into its body, through
the surface, the nutritious, already digested liquid food in the intestine.
There are no eyes nor other special sense organs, nor any organs of locomo-
tion. The body is very degenerate. The life history of the tapeworm is
interesting, because of the necessity of two hosts for its completion. The
eggs of the tapeworm pass from the intestine with the excreta, and must
be taken into the body of some other animal in order to develop. In the
case of one of the several species of tapeworms that infest man, this other
host must be the pig. In the alimentary canal of the pig the young tape-
worm develops and later bores its way through the walls of the canal and
becomes imbedded in the muscles. There it lies, until it finds its way into
the alimentary canal of man by his eating the flesh of the pig. In the
intestine of man the tapeworm continues to develop until it becomes full
grown. . . .

Another group of animals, many of whose members are parasites, are
the roundworms or threadworms. The free-living roundworms are active,
well-organized animals, but the parasitic kinds all show a greater or less
degree of degeneration. One of the most terrible parasites of man is a
roundworm called Trichina spiralis. It is a minute worm, from one to
three millimeters long, which in its adult condition lives in the intestine
of man or of the pig or other mammals. The young are born alive and
bore through the walls of the intestine. They migrate to the voluntary
muscles of the hosts, especially those of the limbs and back, and here each
worm coils itself up in a muscle fiber and becomes inclosed in a spindle-

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 331

shaped cyst or cell. A single muscle may be infested by hundreds of thou-
sands of these minute worms. It has been estimated that fully one hun-
dred million encysted worms may exist in the muscles of a "trichinized"
human body. The muscles undergo more or less degeneration, and the
death of the host may occur. It is necessary, for the further development of
the worms, that the flesh of the host be eaten by another mammal, as the
flesh of the pig by man, or the flesh of man by a pig or rat. The Trichina
in the alimentary canal of the new host develop into active adult worms
and produce new young.

In the Yellowstone Lake the trout are infested by the larvae or young
of a roundworm which reach a length of twenty inches, and which are
often found stitched, as it were, through the viscera and the muscles of
the fish. The infested trout become feeble and die, or are eaten by the
pelicans which fish in this lake. In the alimentary canal of the pelican the
worms become adult, and parts of the worms containing eggs escape from
the alimentary canal with the excreta. These portions of worms are eaten
by the trout, and the eggs give birth to new worms which develop in
the bodies of the fish with disastrous effects. It is estimated that for each
pelican in Yellowstone Lake over five million eggs of the parasitic worms
are discharged into the lake.

The young of various carnivorous animals are often infested by one
of the species of roundworms called "pup worms." Recent investigations
show that thousands of the young or pup fur seals are destroyed each
year by these parasites. The eggs of the worm lie through the winter in
the sands of the breeding grounds of the fur seal. The young receive them
from the fur of the mother and the worm develops in the upper intes-
tine. It feeds on the blood of the young seal, which finally dies from
anaemia. On the sand beaches of the seal islands in Bering Sea there are
every year thousands of dead seal pups which have been killed by this
parasite. On the rocky rookeries, the young seals are not affected by this
parasite.

Among the more highly organized animals the results of a parasitic
life, in degree of structural degeneration, can be more readily seen. A
well-known parasite, belonging to the Crustacea — the class of shrimps,
crabs, lobsters, and crayfishes — is Sacculina. The young Sacculina is an
active, free-swimming larva much like a young prawn or young crab.
But the adult bears absolutely no resemblance to such a typical crus-
tacean as a crayfish or crab. The Sacculina after a short period of inde-
pendent existence attaches itself to the abdomen of a crab, and there
completes its development while living as a parasite. In its adult condi-
tion it is simply a great tumorlike sac, bearing many delicate rootlike

332 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

suckers which penetrate the body o£ the crab host and absorb nutriment.
The Sacculina has no eyes, no mouth parts, no legs, or other appendages,
and hardly any of the usual organs except reproductive organs.

Other parasitic Crustacea, as the numerous kinds of fish lice which
live attached to the gills or to other parts of fish, and derive all their
nutriment from the body of the fish, show various degrees of degenera-
tion. With some of these fish lice the female, which looks like a puffed-
out worm, is attached to the fish or other aquatic animal, while the
male, which is perhaps only a tenth of the size of the female, is per-
manently attached to the female, living parasitically on her.

Among the insects there are many kinds that live parasitically for
part of their lives, and not a few that live as parasites for their whole
lives. The true sucking lice and the bird lice live for their whole lives
as external parasites on the bodies of their host, but they are not fixed —
that is, they retain their legs and power of locomotion, although they have
lost their wings through degeneration. The eggs of the lice are deposited
on the hair of the mammal or bird that serves as host; the young hatch
and immediately begin to live as parasites, either sucking the blood or
feeding on the hair or feathers of the host. . . . The ichneumon flies are
parasites of other insects, especially of the larvae of beetles and moths and
butterflies. In fact, the ichneumon flies do more to keep in check die in-
crease of injurious and destructive caterpillars than do all our artificial
remedies for these insect pests. . . .

One of the most remarkable ichneumon flies is Thalessa, which has a
very long, slender, flexible ovipositor, or egg-laying organ. An insect
known as the pigeon horntail deposits its eggs, by means of a strong,
piercing ovipositor, half an inch deep in the trunk wood of growing
tree. The young or larval pigeon horntail is a 'soft-bodied white grub,
which bores deeply into the trunk of the tree, filling up the burrow
behind it with small chips. The Thalessa is a parasite of the pigeon horn-
tail, and "when a female Thalessa finds a tree infested by the pigeon horn-
tail, she selects a place which she judges is opposite a pigeon horntail
burrow, and, elevating her long ovipositor in a loop over her back, with
its tip on the bark of the tree, she makes a derrick out of her body and
proceeds with great skill and precision to drill a hole into the tree. When
the pigeon horntail burrow is reached she deposits an egg in it. The
larva that hatches from this egg creeps along this burrow until it reaches
its victim, and then fastens itself to the horntail larva, which it destroys
by sucking its blood. The larva of Thalessa, when full grown, changes
to a pupa within the burrow of its host, and the adult gnaws a hole out

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 333

through the bark i£ it does not find the hole already made by the pigeon
horntail."

. . . Almost all of the mites and ticks, animals allied to the spiders, live
parasitically. Most of them live as external parasites, sucking the blood
of their host, but some live underneath the skin like the itch mites,
which cause, in man, the disease known as the itch.

Among the vertebrate animals there are not many examples of true
parasitism. The hagfishes or borers have been already mentioned. These
are long and cylindrical, eel-like creatures, very slimy and very low in
structure. The mouth is without jaws, but forms a sucking disk, by which
the hagfish attaches itself to the body of some other fish. By means of
the rasping teeth on its tongue, it makes a round hole through the skin,
usually at the throat. It then devours all the muscular substance of the
fish, leaving the viscera untouched. When the fish finally dies it is a
mere hulk of skin, scales, bones, and viscera, nearly all the muscle being
gone. Then the hagfish slips out and attacks another individual.

The lamprey, another low fish, in similar fashion feeds leechlike on
the blood of other fishes, which it obtains by lacerating the flesh with
its rasp-like teeth, remaining attached by the round sucking disk of
its mouth.

Certain birds, as the cowbird and the European cuckoo, have a para-
sitic habit, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving their
young to be hatched and reared by their unwilling hosts.

We may also note that parasitism and consequent structural degenera-
tion are not at all confined to animals. Many plants are parasites and show
marked degenerative characteristics. The dodder is a familiar example,
clinging to living green plants and thrusting its haustoria or rootlike suck-
ers into their tissue to draw from them already elaborated nutritive sap.
Many fungi like the rusts of cereals, the mildew of roses, etc., are parasitic.
Numerous plants, too, are parasites, not on other plants, but on animals.
Among these are the hosts of bacteria (simplest of the one-celled plants)
that swarm in the tissues of all animals, some of which are causal agents
of some of the worst of human and animal diseases (as typhoid fever,
diphtheria, and cholera in man, anthrax in cattle). There are also many
more highly organized fungi that live in and on the bodies of insects,
often killing them by myriads. One of the great checks to the ravages of
the corn- and wheat-infesting chinch bug of the Mississippi Valley is a
parasitic fungus. In the autumn, house flies may often be seen dead against
a windowpane surrounded by a delicate ring or halo of white. This ring
is composed of spores of a fungus which has grown through all the tissue*

334 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

of the fly while alive, finally resulting in its death. The spores serve to
inoculate other flies that may come near.

Just as in animals, so in plants; parasitic kinds, especially among the
higher groups as the flowering plants, often show marked degeneration.
Leaves may be reduced to mere scales, roots are lost, and the water-
conducting tissues greatly reduced. This degeneration in plants naturally
affects primarily those parts which in the normal plant are devoted
to the gathering and elaboration of inorganic food materials, namely,
the leaves and stems and roots. The flowers or reproductive organs
usually retain, in parasites, all of their high development.

While parasitism is the principal cause of degeneration of animals,
other causes may be also concerned. Fixed animals or animals leading
inactive or sedentary lives, also become degenerate, even when no para-
sitism is concerned. . . .

A barnacle is an example of degeneration through quiescence. The
barnacles are crustaceans related most nearly to the crabs and shrimps.
The young barnacle just from the egg is six-legged, free-swimming, much
like a young prawn or crab, with single eye. In its next larval stage it
has six pairs of swimming feet, two compound eyes, and two large
antennae or feelers, and still lives an independent, free-swimming life.
When it makes its final change to the adult condition, it attaches itself
to some stone or shell, or pile or ship's bottom, loses its compound eyes
and feelers, develops a protecting shell, and gives up all power of locomo-
tion. Its swimming feet become changed into grasping organs, and it
loses most of its outward resemblances to the other members of its class.

Certain insects live sedentary or fixed lives. All the members of the
family of scale insects, in one sex at least, show degeneration that has
been caused by quiescence. One of these, called the red orange scale, is
very abundant in Florida and California and in other orange-growing
regions. The male is a beautiful, tiny, two-winged midge, but the female
is a wingless, footless little sac without eyes or other organs of special
sense, and lies motionless under a flat, thin, circular, reddish scale com-
posed of wax and two or three cast skins of the insect itself. The insect
has a long, slender, flexible, sucking beak, which is thrust into the leaf
or stem or fruit of the orange on which the "scale bug" lives and through
which the insect sucks the orange sap, which is its only food. It lays
eggs or gives birth to young under its body, under the protecting wax
scale, and dies. From the eggs hatch active little larval scale bugs with
eyes and feelers and six legs. They crawl from under the wax scale and
roam about over the orange tree. Finally, they settle down, thrust their
sucking beak into the plant tissues, and cast their skin. The females lose

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION 335

at this molt their legs and eyes and feelers. Each becomes a mere motion-
less sac capable only of sucking up sap and of laying eggs. The young
males, however, lose their sucking beak and can no longer take food,
but they gain a pair of wings and an additional pair of eyes. They fly
about and fertilize the saclike females, which then molt again and secrete
the thin wax scale over them.

. . . Loss of certain organs may occur through other causes than para-
sitism and a fixed life. Many insects live but a short time in their adult
stage. May flies live for but a few hours or, at most, a few days. They
do not need to take food to sustain life for so short a time, and so their
mouth parts have become rudimentary and functionless or are entirely
lost. This is true of some moths and numerous other specially short-lived
insects. Among the social insects the workers of the termites and of the
true ants are wingless, although they are born of winged parents, and
are descendants of winged ancestors. The modification of structure de-
pendent upon the division of labor among the individuals of the com-
munity has taken the form, in the case of the workers, of a degeneration
in the loss of the wings. Insects that live in caves are mostly blind; they
have lost the eyes, whose function could not be exercised in the darkness
of the cave. Certain island-inhabiting insects have lost their wings, flight
being attended with too much danger. The strong sea breezes may at any
time carry a flying insect oflf the small island to sea. Probably only those
which do not fly much survive, and so by natural selection wingless
breeds or species are produced. Finally, the body may be modified in color
and shape so as to resemble some part of the environment, and thus the
animal may be unperceived by its enemies.

When we say that a parasitic or quiescent mode of life leads to or
causes degeneration, we have explained the stimulus or the ultimate rea-
son for the degenerative changes, but we have not shown just how
parasitism or quiescence actually produces these changes. Degeneration or
the atrophy and disappearance of organs or parts of a body is often said
to be due to disuse. That is, the disuse of a part is believed by many
naturalists to be the sufficient cause for its gradual dwindling and final
loss. That disuse can so affect parts of a body during the lifetime of an
individual is true. A muscle unused becomes soft and flabby and small.
Whether the effects of such disuse can be inherited, however, is open
to serious doubt. ... If not, some other immediate cause, or some other
cause along with disuse, must be found.

We are accustomed, perhaps, to think of degeneration as necessarily
implying a disadvantage in life. A degenerate animal is considered to be
not the equal of a nondegenerate animal, and this would be true if both

336 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

kinds of animals had to face the same conditions of life. The blind, foot-
less, simple, degenerate animal could not cope with the active, keen-
sighted, highly organized nondegenerate in free competition. But free
competition is exactly what the degenerate animal has nothing to do
with. Certainly the Sacculina lives successfully; it is well adapted for its
own peculiar kind of life. For the life of a scale insect, no better type of
structure could be devised. A parasite enjoys certain obvious advantages
in life, and even extreme degeneration is no drawback, but rather favors
it in the advantageousness of its sheltered and easy life. As long as the
host is successful in eluding its enemies and avoiding accident and injury,
the parasite is safe. It needs to exercise no activity or vigilance of its own;
its life is easy as long as its host lives. But the disadvantages of parasitism
and degeneration are apparent also. The fate of the parasite is usually
bound up with the fate of the host. When the enemy of the host crab
prevails, the Sacculina goes down without a chance to struggle in its
own defense. But far more important than the disadvantage in such
particular or individual cases is the disadvantage of the fact that the
parasite cannot adapt itself in any considerable degree to new conditions.
It has become so specialized, so greatly modified and changed to adapt
itself to the one set of conditions under which it now lives, it has gone so
far in its giving up of organs and body parts, that if present conditions
should change and new ones come to exist, the parasite could not adapt
itself to them. The independent, active animal with all its organs and all
its functions intact, holds itself, one may say, ready and able to adapi
itself to any new conditions of life which may gradually come into exist-
ence. The parasite has risked everything for the sake of a sure and easy
life under the presently existing conditions. Change of conditions means
its extinction.

1908

Flowering Earth

DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

From Flowering Earth

CHLOROPHYLL: THE SUN TRAP

WHAT WE LOVE, WHEN ON A SUMMER DAY WE STEP
into the coolness of a wood, is that its boughs close up behind us.
We are escaped, into another room of life. The wood does not live as we
live, restless and running, panting after flesh, and even in sleep tossing
with fears. It is aloof from thoughts and instincts; it responds, but only
to the sun and wind, the rock and the stream — never, though you shout
yourself hoarse, to propaganda, temptation, reproach, or promises. You
cannot mount a rock and preach to a tree how it shall attain the kingdom
of heaven. It is already closer to it, up there, than you will grow to be.
And you cannot make it see the light, since in the tree's sense you are
blind. You have nothing to bring it, for all the forest is self-sufficient; if
you burn it, cut, hack through it with a blade, it angrily repairs the
swathe with thorns and weeds and fierce suckers. Later there are good
green leaves again, toiling, adjusting, breathing — forgetting you.

For this green living is the world's primal industry; yet it makes no
roar. Waving its banners, it marches across the earth and the ages, without
dust around its columns. I do not hold that all of that life is pretty; it is
not, in purpose, sprung for us, and moves under no compulsion to please.
If ever you fought with thistles, or tried to pull up a cattail's matted root-
stocks, you will know how plants cling to their own lives and defy you.
The pond-scums gather in the cistern, frothing and buoyed with their
own gases; the storm waves fling at your feet upon the beach the limp
sea-lettuce wrenched from its submarine hold — reminder that there too,
where the light is filtered and refracted, there is life still to intercept and
net and by it proliferate. Inland from the shore I look and see the coastal
ranges clothed in chaparral — dense shrubbery and scrubbery, close-fisted,
intricately branched, suffocating the rash rambler in the noon heat with

337

338 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

its pungency. Beyond, on the deserts, under a fierce sky, between the
harsh lunar ranges of unweathered rock, life still, somehow, fights its
way through the year, with thorn and succulent cell and indomitable
root.

Between such embattled life and the Forest of Arden, with its ancient
beeches and enchanter's nightshade, there is no great biologic difference.
Each lives by the cool and cleanly and most commendable virtue of being
green. And though that is not biological language, it is the whole story in
two words. So that we ought not speak of getting at the root of a matter,
but of going back to the leaf of things. The orator who knows the way
to the country's salvation and does not know that the breath of life he
draws was blown into his nostrils by green leaves, had better spare his
breath. And before anyone builds a new state upon the industrial prole-
tariat, he will be wisely cautioned to discover that the source of all
wealth is the peasantry of grass.

The reason for these assertions — which I do not make for metaphorical
effect but maintain quite literally — is that the green leaf pigment, called
chlorophyll, is the one link between the sun and life; it is the conduit
of perpetual energy to our own frail organisms.

For inert and inorganic elements — water and carbon dioxide of the
air, the same that we breathe out as a waste — chlorophyll can synthesize
with the energy of sunlight. Every day, every hour of all the ages, as
each continent and, equally important, each ocean rolls into sunlight,
chlorophyll ceaselessly creates. Not figuratively, but literally, in the grand
First Chapter Genesis style. One instant there are a gas and water, as
lifeless as the core of earth or the chill of space; and the next they are
become living tissue — mortal yet genitive, progenitive, resilient with all
the dewy adaptability of flesh, ever changing in order to stabilize some
unchanging ideal of form. Life, in short, synthesized, plant-synthesized,
light-synthesized. Botanists say photosynthesized. So that the post-Biblical
synthesis of life is already a fact. Only when man has done as much, may
he call himself the equal of a weed.

Plant life sustains the living world; more precisely, chlorophyll does
so, and where, in the vegetable kingdom, there is not chlorophyll or some-
thing closely like it, then that plant or cell is a parasite — no better, in vital
economy, than a mere animal or man. Blood, bone and sinew, all flesh
is grass. Grass to mutton, mutton to wool, wool to the coat on my back —
it runs like one of those cumulative nursery rhymes, the wealth and
diversity of our material life accumulating from the primal fact of chloro-
phyll's activity. The roof of my house, the snapping logs upon the
hearth, the desk where I write, are my imports from the plant kingdom.

FLOWERING EARTH 339

But the whole of modern civilization is based upon a whirlwind spending
of the plant wealth long ago and very slowly accumulated. For, funda-
mentally, and away back, coal and oil, gasoline and illuminating gas had
green origins too. With the exception of a small amount of water power,
a still smaller of wind and tidal mills, the vast machinery of our complex
living is driven only by these stores of plant energy.

We, then, the animals, consume those stores in our restless living.
Serenely the plants amass them. They turn light's active energy to food,
which is potential energy stored for their own benefit. Only if the daisy
is browsed by the cow, the maple leaf sucked of its juices by an insect,
will that green leaf become of our kind. So we get the song of a bird at
dawn, the speed in the hoofs of the fleeing deer, the noble thought in
the philosopher's mind. So Plato's Republic was builded on leeks and
cabbages.

Animal life lives always in the red; the favorable balance is written
on the other side of life's page, and it is written in chlorophyll. All else
obeys the thermodynamic law that energy forever runs down hill, is
lost and degraded. In economic language, this is the law of diminishing
returns, and it is obeyed by the cooling stars as by man and all the
animals. They float down its Lethe stream. Only chlorophyll fights up
against the current. It is the stuff in life that rebels at death, that has
never surrendered to entropy, final icy stagnation. It is the mere cobweb
on which we are all suspended over the abyss.

And what then is this substance which is not itself alive but is made
by life and makes life, and is never found apart from life?

I remember the first time I ever held it, in the historic dimness of the
old Agassiz laboratories, pure, in my hands. My teacher was an owl-eyed
master, with a chuckling sense of humor, who had been trained in the
greatest laboratory in Germany, and he believed in doing the great things
first. So on the first day of his course he set us to extracting chlorophyll,
and I remember that his eyes blinked amusement behind his glasses,
because when he told us all to go and collect green leaves and most went
all the way to the Yard for grass, I opened the window and stole from
a vine upon the wall a handful of Harvard's sacred ivy.

We worked in pairs, and my fellow student was a great-grand-nephew
or something of the sort, of Elias Fries, the founder of the study of fungi.
Together we boiled the ivy leaves, then thrust them in alcohol. After a
while it was the leaves which were colorless while the alcohol had become
green. We had to dilute this extract with water, and then we added ben-
zol, because this will take the chlorophyll away from the alcohol which,
for its part, very conveniently retains the yellow pigments also found

340 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

in leaves. This left us with a now yellowish alcohol and, floating on top
of it, a thick green benzol; you could simply decant the latter carefully
off into a test tube, and there you had chlorophyll extract, opaque,
trembling, heavy, a little viscous and oily, and smelling, but much too
rankly, like a lawn-mower's blades after a battle with rainy grass.

Then, in a darkened room where beams from a spectroscope escaped
in painful darts of light as from the cracks in an old-fashioned magic
lantern, we peered at our extracted chlorophyll through prisms. Just as
in a crystal chandelier the sunlight is shattered to a rainbow, so in the
spectroscope light is spread out in colored bands — a long narrow ribbon,
sorting the white light by wave lengths into its elemental parts. And the
widths, the presence or the absence, of each cross-band on the ribbon,
tell the tale of a chemical element present in the spectrum, much as the
bands on a soldier's insignial ribbon show service in Asia, in the tropics,
on the border, in what wars. When the astronomer has fixed spectroscope
instead of telescope upon a distant star, he reads off the color bands as
easily as one soldier reads another's, and will tell you whether sodium
or oxygen, helium or iron is present.

Just so our chlorophyll revealed its secrets. The violet and blue end of
the spectrum was almost completely blacked out. And that meant that
chlorophyll absorbed and used these high-frequency waves. So, too, the
red and orange were largely obliterated, over at the right hand side of
our tell-tale bar. It was the green that came through clearly. So we call
plants green because they use that color least. It is what they reject as
fast as it smites the upper cells; it is what they turn back, reflect, flash
into our grateful retinas.

It was only routine in a young botanist's training to make an extraction
and spectrum analysis of chlorophyll. My student friends over in the
chemistry laboratories were more excited than I about it. They were
working under Conant, before he became president of Harvard and had
to sneak into his old laboratory at night with a key he still keeps. For
chlorophyll was Conant's own problem. His diagram of its structure,
displayed to ine by his students, was closely worked over with symbols
and signs, unfolded to something like the dimensions of a blue print of
Boulder Dam, and made clear — to anyone who could understand it! —
how the atoms are arranged and deployed and linked in such a tremen-
dous molecule as MgN4C5oH72Os.

To Otto and Alfred and Mort every jot and joint in the vast Rube
Goldberg machinery of that structural formula had meaning, and more
ehan meaning — the geometrical beauty of the one right, inevitable position
for every atom. To me, a botanist's apprentice, a future naturalist, there

FLOWERING EARTH 341

was just one fact to quicken the pulse. That fact is the close similarity
between chlorophyll and hemoglobin, the essence of our blood.

So that you may lay your hand upon the smooth flank o£ a beech, and
say, "We be of one blood, brother, thou and I."

The one significant difference in the two structural formulas is this:
that the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while
in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium.

Iron is strong and heavy, clamorous when struck, avid of oxygen and
capable of corruption. It does not surprise us by its presence in our blood
stream. Magnesium is a light, silvery, unresonant metal; its density is
only one seventh that of iron, it has half of iron's molecular weight, and
melts at half the temperature. It is rustless, ductile and pliant; it burns
with a brilliant white light rich in actinic rays, and is widely distributed
through the upper soil, but only, save at mineral springs, in dainty quan-
tities. Yet the plant succeeds always in finding that mere trace that it
needs, even when a chemist might fail to detect it.

How does the chlorophyll, green old alchemist that it is, transmute the
dross of earth into living tissue? its hand is swifter than the chemist's
most sensitive analyses. In theory, the step from water and carbon dioxide
to the formation of sugar (the first result readily discerned) must involve
several syntheses; yet it goes on in a split hundredth of a second. One
sunlight particle or photon strikes the chlorophyll, and instantaneously
the terribly tenacious molecule of water, which we break down into its
units of hydrogen and oxygen only with difficulty and expense, is torn
apart; so too is the carbon dioxide molecule. Building blocks of the three
elements, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, are then whipped at lightning
speed into carbonic acid; this is instantly changed over into formic acid —
the same that smarts so in our nerve endings when an ant stings us. No
sooner formed than formic acid becomes formaldehyde and hydrogen
peroxide. This last is poisonous, but a ready enzyme in the plant probably
splits it as fast as it is born into harmless water and oxygen, while the
formaldehyde is knocked at top speed into a new pattern — and is grape
sugar, glucose. And all before you can say Albert Einstein. Indeed, by
the time you have said Theophrastus Bombastus Aureolus Paracelsus von
Hohenheim, the sugar may have lost a modicum of water — and turned
into starch, the first product of photosynthesis that could be detected by
the methods of fifty years ago.

At this very instant, with the sun delivering to its child the earth, in
the bludgeoning language of mathematics, 215 X io15 calories per second,
photosynthesis is racing along wherever the leaf can reach the light. (All
else goes to waste.) True, its efficiency is very low — averaging no better

342 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

than one per cent, while our machines are delivering up to twenty-five
per cent of the fuel they combust. But that which they burn — coal and
gas, oils and wood — was made, once, by leaves in ancient geologic times.
The store of such energy is strictly finite. Chlorophyll alone is hitched
to what is, for earthly purposes, the infinite.

Light, in the latest theory, is not waves in a sea of ether, or a jet from
a nozzle; it could be compared rather to machine gun fire, every photo-
electric bullet of energy traveling in regular rhythm, at a speed that
bridges the astronomical gap in eight minutes. As each bullet hits an
electron of chlorophyll it sets it to vibrating, at its own rate, just as one
tuning fork, when struck, will cause another to hum in the same pitch.
A bullet strikes — and one electron is knocked galley west into a dervish
dance like the madness of the atoms in the sun. The energy splits open
chlorophyll molecules, recombines their atoms, and lies there, dormant,
in foods.

The process seems miraculously adjusted. And yet, like most living
processes, it is not perfect. The reaction time of chlorophyll is not geared
as high as the arrival of the light-bullets. Light comes too fast; plants,
which are the very children of light, can get too much of it. Exposure to
the sunlight on the Mojave desert is something that not a plant in my
garden, no, nor even the wiry brush in the chaparral, could endure. Lids
against the light plants do not have; but by torsions of the stalk some
leaves may turn their blades edge-on to dazzling radiation, and present
them again broadside in failing light. Within others the chlorophyll
granules too, bun or pellet-shaped as they are, can roll for a side or
frontal exposure toward the light. In others they can crowd to the top
of a cell and catch faint rays, or sink or flee to the sides to escape a searing
blast ....

When I began to write these pages, before breakfast, the little fig tree
outside my window was rejoicing in the early morning light. It is a
special familiar of my work, a young tree that has never yet borne fruit.
It is but a little taller than I, has only two main branches and forty-three
twigs, and the brave if not impressive sum of two hundred and sixteen
leaves — I have touched every one with a counting finger. Though sparse,
they are large, mitten-shaped, richly green with chlorophyll. I compute,
by measuring the leaf and counting both sides, that my little tree has
a leaf surface of about eighty-four square feet. This sun-trap was at work
today long before I.

Those uplifted hand-like leaves caught the first sky light. It was poor
for the fig's purpose, but plant work begins from a nocturnal zero. When
I came to my desk the sun was full upon those leaves — and it is a won-

FLOWERING EARTH 343

drous thing how they are disposed so that they do not shade each other.
By the blazing California noon, labor in the leaves must have faltered
from very excess of light; all the still golden afternoon it went on; now
as the sun sets behind a sea fog the little fig slackens peacefully at its task.

Yet in the course of a day it has made sugar for immediate burning and
energy release, put by a store of starch for future use; with the addition
of nitrogen and other salts brought up in water from the roots it has
built proteins too — the very bricks and mortar of the living protoplasm,
and the perdurable stuff of permanent tissue. The annual growth ring
in the v/ood of stem and twigs has widened an infinitesimal but a real
degree. The fig is one day nearer to its coming of age, to flowering and
fruiting. Then, still leafing out each spring, still toiling in the sunlight
that I shall not be here to see, it may go on a century and more, growing
eccentric, solidifying whimsies, becoming a friend to generations. It will
be "the old fig" then. And at last it may give up the very exertion of
bearing. It will lean tough elbows in the garden walks, and gardeners
yet unborn will scold it and put up with it. But still it will leaf out till
it dies.

Dusk is here now. So I switch on the lamp beside my desk. The power-
house burns its hoarded tons of coal a week, and gives us this instant and
most marvelous current. But that light is not new. It was hurled out of
the sun two hundred million years ago, and was captured by the leaves
of the Carboniferous tree-fern forests, fell with the falling plant, was
buried, fossilized, dug up and resurrected. It is the same light. And, in
my little fig tree as in the ancient ferns, it is the same unchanging green
stuff from age to age, passed without perceptible improvement from
evolving plant to plant. What it is and does, so complex upon examina-
tion, lies about us tranquil and simple, with the simplicity of a miracle.

THE SEEDS OF LIFE

This earth, this third planet from the sun, was lifeless once. The rocks
tell that much. There is one place in the world where the complete
record is written on a single stone tablet. The Grand Canyon of the
Colorado River is a cross section of geologic time. Cut by a master hand,
the testimony appears to our eyes marvelously magnified. The strata burn
with their intense elemental colors; they are defined as sharply as chapters,
and the book is flung wide open. A silver thread of river underscores the
bottom-most line, the dark Vishnu schist where no life ever was.

Mother-rock, these lowest strata are aboriginal stuff. They are without
a fossil, without a trace of the great detritus of living, the shells and
shards, the chalky or metallic excreta of harsh, primitive existence. These

344 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

pre-life eras have been past for a long time — two billion years, perhaps.
Perhaps a little more. Astronomical sums of time are so great that they
bankrupt the imagination. We listen to the geologists and physicists
wrangling over their accounts and compounding vast historical debts
with the relish of usurers, but it is all one to us after the first million years.

No matter here how they arrived at their calculations. As plantsmen we
are interested in the moment when the first plant began. For there was
raised the flag of life.

The first life on earth — I have no doubt of it — was plant life. Any
organism that could exist upon a naked planet would have to be com-
pletely self-supporting. It would have to be such a being as could absorb
raw, elemental materials and, using inorganic sources of energy, make
living protoplasm of them. Such describes no animal. But it perfectly
describes an autotrophic plant. An autotroph is a self-sustaining vital
mechanism.

The geologist's picture of the younger stages of this our agreeable planet
home resembles the Apocalyptic doom for the world that I once heard
predicted to innocents in a Presbyterian Sunday School. For the geologist
sees flaming jets of incandescent gas, bolts and flashes that, condensing
as they cooled, became a swarm of planetesimals, fragments comparable
to great meteoric masses of stone and metal. These, by all the rules of
orthodox astronomy, must rush together whenever their orbits came too
close. So, by shocking impacts, the world was slapped together at random.
It grew snowball fashion. It probably grew hotter, rather than cooler,
from the friction and energy of the collisions, and the increasing pressure
on the core must have generated a heat to melt the heart of a stone. So,
in a molten state, the heaviest elements sank to the gravitational center,
and formed the lithosphere — terra firma itself — while the lightest rose to
become the atmosphere.

That atmosphere, it is presumed, was far, far thicker than it is today.
It was perhaps hundreds of miles high, and may have had an abundance
of now rare gases, like helium and hydrogen, neon and argon, and
possibly even very poisonous gases, sulphur-drenched vapors, deadly
combinations of carbon with oxygen, of oxygen with nitrogen. Almost cer-
tainly there was much less free oxygen and free nitrogen and carbon di-
oxide, than now, and correspondingly little scope for life as we know it.

But dense mists of water vapor, of steam clouds forever moiling and
trailing about the stony little sphere, there must have been. For the
oceans were, presumably, all up in the air. Only with cooling they began
to condense, to fall in century-long cloudbursts, filling the deeps and
hollows. At first, perhaps, striking hot rock, they were immediately

FLOWERING EARTH 345

turned to hissing steam again. The stabilization o£ the oceans alone must
have been an awesomely long affair. It is doubtful if any sunlight at all
got through that veil of primordial cloud, and the earth, viewed from
Mars, would have been as unsatisfactory as Venus seen from the earth
today, for the clouds of Venus never lift. Darkness then, darkness over
the peaks clawed by the fingers of the deluge and dragged into the
oceans; darkness over the forming seas that were not salty and full of an
abundant and massive life, but fresh water, like that of the present Great
Lakes. Fresh, and empty of life, warm, and dark. Darkness, and warmth,
and water. Dark and warm as the womb, and awash with an amniotic
fluid.

And into this uterine sea fell the seeds of life.

The oldest fossils in the oldest of all fossil-bearing rocks, the Archaeo-
zoic, tell six unmistakable things:

The first organisms of which there is any record on the stone tablets
of time were cellular, just like all modern organisms.

They were aquatic, like all the most primitive organisms.

They were plants, unmistakably.

They were microscopic.

And they were bacteria.

Of course these were bacteria of a very special sort. Not in the least like
the germs that cause diseases of man or those useful scavengers, sapro-
phytes, that break up dead plant and animal remains and excreta. For
these dread parasites and vulturine saprophytes are finicking and highly
specialized. The parasites are hothouse species, most of them unable to
endure more than a few hours outside very modern and complex bodies;
even the saprophytes imply the presence of higher organisms to feed on.
Not one is an autotroph. Not one sustains itself.

No, the kind of bacteria that left their marks upon the ineradicable
record is a sort never studied by medicine. They are autotrophs, sufficient
unto themselves. They invade no living bodies; they are probably not
related at all to those which do, and if one kind is bacteria, the other
ought really to have a clear name of its own. But there is no other com-
mon English name for them; botanists call everything "bacteria" which
is so small that very little structure can be discerned.

One at least of these autotrophic bacteria that lived in the dark, hot,
fresh-water ocean, was the selfsame plant that is found today in mineral
springs heavily charged with iron, in old wells driven through hardpan,
in those rusty or tannic-looking brooks that seep away from stagnant
bogs, where bog iron ore is gathering. Its name is Leptothrix. The
Archaeozoic rocks are about one billion years old. In all that time the

346 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

ochre Leptothrix has not changed one atom. As it reproduces simply by
fission — the splitting of one bacterial cell into two — it has never died. It
is, in body, immortal, and may outlive all other races.

The place to look for Leptothrix is around a mineral spring. On the
rocks, in little nubbly reefs, in the brooks running from the springs, there
waves a yellowish-rusty slime. This has a greasy feeling to the fingers;
it rubs away instantly to nothing. But when you tease a little out in a
drop of water, and shove the drop, on its clean glass slide, under the lens,
the slime comes to life. For besides a great deal of shapeless rusty blobs
and cobwebs, there are imbedded in this mass long unpartitioned fila-
ments or tubes. They look a bit like root hairs under low magnification,
and are surrounded by a nimbus of slime.

But the walls of the filament are absolutely definite; they proclaim
organization, clear-cut form, something with the shape that only the
living take on. And those walls of the filaments are of iron, deposited
around the living bacterial cells by accretion.

As for the bacterial cells themselves, they are elliptical bodies, but
remarkable for having "tails." So, placed end to end, they look like polly-
wogs packed into a boy's pea shooter. When overcrowded, some of the
bacteria escape. Then by their lashing polar tails they swim free, just like
a sperm cell of a seaweed or a mammal. Soon a fresh deposit of iron settles
around them. As it lengthens, daughter cells come to fill it, by fission of
the mother-cell.

Actual living Leptothrix colonies fully charged with active bacteria are
not especially easy to find. Often one hunts for hours on bacterial slides,
encountering only empty sheaths. But their fossil imprint is particularly
sharp and unmistakable. And the sheaths, being iron, and not living
matter subject to decay, have long lasting powers. Thus in the iron-
charged waters that overlay some of the most ancient of rocks, Leptothrix
flourished for countless dark ages, slowly, slowly dropping the detritus
of its outworn shards, building up an ooze that, under the terrific pressure
of the water above, became iron ore.

But how, it is right to ask, was Leptothrix able to live without photo-
synthesis? How was it nurtured in a water that contained few or none
of sea water's rich salts of today, but only a bitter diet of iron compounds?

Leptothrix lived then, as it does today, by oxidizing iron. When we
oxidize carbon (burn coal) we release enough energy to turn all the
mills of the world. When oxygen rushes into the lungs of an asphyxiated
man, his anemic blood is refreshed; his eyelids flutter, he comes to life.
Life is one vast oxidation, one breathing and burning. Man and his
beasts are fueled by the plants; the plants consume the earth stuff they

FLOWERING EARTH 347

built up by their green sun-power; but Leptothrix, aboriginal, microscopic
Leptothrix, taps atomic energy. It literally eats iron.

Such is chemosynthesis, contrasted with photosynthesis. In a darkened
world of water, chemosynthesis was then the only possible synthesis — or
assembling of materials into life — and how effective it was for how long
can be judged from the work of Leptothrix in the waters that once rolled
above the Mesabi range, north of Lake Superior. This iron seam, believed
to be largely the work of iron bacteria depositing a subterranean reef, is
called by engineers simply "The Range," for beside it there is no other
comparable. It is the range of all iron ranges, and so great and so heavy
is the ore yearly moved out of it, that the locks of the Sault canal, though
open only six or seven months of the year, and having a traffic deeply
loaded only on the out voyage, transmit more tonnage than any other
canal in the world, excepting none. . . .

Others of these element-consuming bacteria oxidize carbon or hydrogen
or nitrogen or ammonia or marsh gas. When they combust this last, then
the will-o'-the-wisp dances over the bogs. Still another has manganese for
its staff of life. Manganese, by the way, is an alloy of the steel used to
burglar-proof safes. But it is no proof against the microscopic, hard-
headed Cladothrix. Variously we are being used or served by these
masters of a fundamental and simple way of life, the autotrophic bacteria.
Some of them have holdfasts, like a kelp or rooted waterweed, so that
instead of floating at random, they can grow forest-wise in the waters
they inhabit. These enter water pipes and vegetate there, like some flaccid
but indomitable eel-grass in a stream, till the pipes are wholly stopped.

Of the bacterial autotrophs one you may smell on the air, and the odor
is very like that of rotten eggs. For this one (and its name, if you like, is
Beggiatoa) battens upon brimstone. It lives in the mud of curative baths,
and grows in sulphur springs, and by building up a slimy reef it makes
a bowl about some geysers, enduring and even luxuriating in a zone of
their waters that is hot but just not too hot for it. To look at, this sulfur
bacterium is colorless. Under the lens, you may see its strands slither,
slipping over each other in a perpetual undulant motion with the indif-
ference of a knot of bored snakes.

Now, this ill-smelling Medusa is important to all of us alive here. Not
so much because it is sometimes implanted by engineers in septic tanks
as a valuable destroyer, as because of its greed for the sulfur on which
it lives. It is after sulfur everywhere, anywhere, that it can get it in Nature.

Abbreviating the chemistry of it, the result of Beggiatoa's use of sulfur
is sulfuric acid. This is combined with the limes of the soil, creating a
compound of calcium and sulfur that is exactly the fertilizer for which

348 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

all roots are hungering. They do not use, they can not absorb, the sulfur
and sulfurous compounds around them until Beggiatoa has produced
this particular form of it.

And living protoplasm must have sulfur, especially for its nucleus.
Just a pinch of this mustard among the elements — but that pinch is indis-
pensable to the cuisine. So Beggiatoa unlocks for all the rest of life this
invaluable yellow ingredient.

All these autotrophs, with their strange diets and their labor in the
dark, are without color. But there is one more autotrophic group which
catch the attention because they are pigmented. And the pigments,
although not usually green, are photosynthetic.

The red or purple bacteria must, then, have light for their work.
Equally, they must not have free oxygen, for it is fatal to them. When we
cultured them in the old Agassiz laboratory, we filled the flask to the
brim with water, stoppered it against air, and put it in the sunshine at
the window. There photosynthesis began.

How, since here was no chlorophyll? The answer refers the imagination
to antiquity. The pigment of the reds or purples is called bacterio-
purpurin, and I don't think anyone knows very much about it, but this
much is plain to any mind: bacterio-purpurin (the red) is the comple-
mentary color of chlorophyll (the green). So these two utilize just the
opposite parts of the spectrum. Imagine, then, that murky and chaotic age
of the world, when sunlight was probably of quite another quality than
this upon my desk today, and filtered many of the rays that make so gay
the little patio garden beyond the window. What used that strange sun-
light, what toiled even then at the beginning of the industry that is the
world's greatest, may have been — must have been — the purple bacteria.

Early as these purple laborers were at the mighty business, those pallid
brother autotrophs, the iron and sulfur bacteria were, I think, earlier still.
For they required not even the tool of light. They were already active
in the day of darkness, in the beginning of things. It is difficult to picture
any earlier form of life. . . .

THE FIRST ALGAS

So in the beginning of things life here on earth must have been, after
all, Adamite — a single, simple kind of organism.

Whether that first-life was bacterial, or algal, or some sort of spon-
taneous colloidal protein system that began to live, this planet in
Archaeozoic times (estimated at one to two billion years ago) was so
impoverished as to variety that a full account of its flora — and fauna, if
any—would make a paper so concise, so lacking in disputatious matter and

FLOWERING EARTH 349

naked of footnotes that a right-thinking college faculty would scarcely
accept it as a doctoral thesis. . . .

Precisely because life is pliant and fluid, it is also, like water, most
difficult to maintain in any shape it does not wish to take. And very hard
it is to turn life from the channels that it has itself grooved deep. The
resilience of life is probably the strongest thing in the universe. For
though the mineral kingdom is vast and mighty, with the abrupt flinty
hardness of all reality, it is for that very reason rigid. And because it is
rigid, the mountains can do no other than stand still and let the lichens
leach them, the delicate mosses pry them open with exquisite fingers, the
invisible bacteria riddle them, and the rain and wind reduce them to dust.

But you can batter a seaweed on the reefs for twice ten million years,
without changing its inner convictions. All that the surf has been able to
accomplish in these eons is to knock the spores out of the slippery fronds —
and so set them adrift to colonize some other reef.

Yet there have been changes in the Green Kingdom, sweeping changes,
far-reaching in their consequences to all of us animals, to the very crust
of the planet we inhabit and, literally, to the air we breathe. Were it not
for these changes, which we call evolution, no lily would rise from the
muck, no alder shake pollen from its curls in the March wind.

The significant fact is that all the really great changes have come from

the inside out. They are born of the inner nature of the organism itself.

They must have lain there, inherent as a possibility (more, as an irre-

jpressible necessity) in the first Adamite organism, just as a tall pine is

potential in a soft pinyon seed no larger than a child's tooth.

These changes are the history of the Green Kingdom. It is a history with
as many dynasties and disasters as the history of China, though I find it
much easier to remember than the long singsong of the wars and rulers
of Cathay. But, like the history of a very ancient people, the story of
plants on earth shows the antiquity of things called modern. As China
invented tools of civilization and forgot them again, as it piled up annals
and archives for hundreds of years, and lost them in a dark age or through
the whim of a bibliophobe ruler, so in the plant kingdom almost every
scheme has been tried once, or many times.

In every part of the sea and on every continent, life has set up one green
stage set after another, taken it down, shipped it elsewhere, put up a new
one. Giant seaweeds were rolled into beach wrack, fossilized sometimes
into great stone dumplings, where now the corn of Illinois stands high,
the chaff of threshing blows in the hot sun, and the soul longs for the sea.
Sixteen times the sea came and went there, alternating with lofty fern
forests. A resinous grove of pine-like trees thrust deep, reached high,

350 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

where now the Papago Indian cuts a cactus to cup in his dark hands one
luke-warm drink against the Arizona sun. And the petrified slab of a
vanished tree that lies on my desk shows its every smallest cell exactly
replaced by a crystalline mineral, as if the Medusa had looked upon that
classic wood.

This tale of the rise and fall of the dynasties of growth must be pieced
out of the rocks and fitted together with a strong and cementing likeli-
hood. Fossil records make up our fragmentary evidence. It is all held
together by the assumption that life began as something simple and
adapted to easy conditions, and progressed toward fitness for the conquest
of more hostile environments. The inferences from this assumption are
borne out by the fossil record, such as it is.

What that record is, and is not, Darwin expressed when he said that
the story of life is written in a book whose language or code changes with
every chapter, and of which all but a few pages have been lost, the little
that remains being scattered to the ends of the earth and senselessly
jumbled.

So every fossil on a museum shelf is a three-fold miracle. First, the
plant had to die under the most exceptional conditions remote from the
normal course of events, which is swift decay, dissolution, and reworking
of the mold into new forms of life. Then, by a wildly fortuitous set of
circumstances, the fossilized evidence must not be washed into the sea,
or buried several miles under sedimentary rocks, but had to come to light,
be bared by erosion, or deprived of its Stygian privacy in the course of
mining or excavating. And then, as the most unlikely chance of all, a
paleobotanist (a very rare fellow even in a densely packed congress of
botanists) had to pass by and collect the specimen before it was burned for
coal, ground up for cement, washed away or otherwise hopelessly
obliterated.

The longer the time elapsed, the less the likelihood that some tangible
record will have survived. For that reason, and because the very earliest
life was so sparse, so minute and fragile, the first rocks that could have
borne life have almost nothing to tell us. They are nearly blank. But not
quite. They speak, from their staggering thickness, of a measure of time
that lasted longer than all the time that has gone by since — perhaps twice
as long. But they speak of life.

To judge from the bacterial traces in them, life was tediously slow in
gathering momentum. The little earth flew around the sun in its annual
course millions and millions of times, and the sun on its unguessable
track had plunged unthinkable distances into space, before much change
had come about in those first vital experiments. We were in some other

FLOWERING EARTH 351

quarter of the universe; our sun appeared, from the viewpoint of other
stars, to belong to some constellation from which it has now fallen, while
the bacteria were leisurely taking the calcium carbonate out of the sea
water and depositing it in the oceanic oozes, as the minute and brief lives
perpetually and vastly died. And, as they laid down the great limestone
beds, over the acid and sterile granites, so on land they were, surely,
delving into the rocks. Bacteria have been brought up from borings five
hundred and even fifteen hundred feet below the surface. So they have
riddled and mollified the rocks and prepared the loams.

And as surely as they were altering their environment, the bacteria were
themselves changing. Not that they were, as a race, departing, for their
seed is still upon earth, the most numerous, important, and likely to out-
last the ages. But they were giving rise — there seems little doubt of it —
to the blue-green pond silks you see today still in stagnant waters.

These Blue-Green algas, just visible to the naked eye as shaky strands in
a ditch, or the merest cast of jade across a lily pond, are the second
chapter in plant history. It can be read only with a microscope, and it
happens that I opened at its pages, in those primer days when I was given
my first fine lens. This microscope was not new nor particularly con-
venient, but it was originally the best from a good factory of lens makers.
It was given me, in those young plant hunting days in the Carolinas,
by a woman naturalist who had used it to study bees and pollen. I remem-
ber how she put it in my hands with a silent blessing on my enthusiasm
and a dry smile at its scope.

As soon as I got it home, I gently opened that case so like a traveling
shrine, and drew forth the stately and intricate image, itself the god that
sees what is hidden. Then I went out to the ditch across the road and
scooped up a saucer full of pond silks. With pipette I snuffled up a long
drop of water and green tress, lowered a little on a slide, and sealed it
with a cover-glass. I was very serious about my technique, and I knew
enough, at least, to realize that the Algae are a great and a right beginning.

My eye to the shaft, I lowered the lens by the big wheel almost to the
slide, peered in, rolled it slowly up, and saw the algal jungle come clear
but distant. Then I snapped in the high power and began, with the fine
wheel, to hunt for the focus again.

First there was a green blur; then, as a falling aviator must, I saw the
green tops of the forest rush upward, come clearer, nearer, till I was in it
and plunging through the top storey into lower tiers. I held my hand —
and suddenly there was life — the first living microscopic forms I had
ever seen, and green with the good green of the great kingdom. No
bacteria here, no unearthly and devious modes of living, but chlorophyll,

352 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

and clear cellular form. As it was a water forest, a sargassum, it was hori-
zontal, the jetsam of a micro-sea. I began to revolve the stage itself, and
felt like a Magellan. . . .

The Algae love the damp, the stagnant ponds, the rolling ocean.
They are, historically speaking, children of the sea, ancients of the first
watery world, so much older than the Rockies that when those moun-
tains were buckled up in a continental camp, their limestones carried up
with them fossilized seaweeds two miles into the air. Even today, whether
they go down into the earth or up to the glacial snows, the Algae are still
— wherever you find them — aquatics. Somehow they divine a thread of
water or a mere film of it. So from that primal fresh-water sea in which
they were born, they have invaded the modern brine and the drying con-
tinents. They are found in snow and on flower pots, in the coruscating
soda of shrinking desert lakes, whether in Tartary or Utah, in hot springs
of New Zealand and Iceland, in sponges and the toe hairs of tree sloths
and on the legs of a Russian tick. They are collected on Antarctic ice and
from the roots of cycads in tropical rain forests. I have seen them where
they form an unholy fluffy felt in the muck of slum yards, and I have
looked down from the top of a skyscraper, in a wilderness of steel and
stone, and seen their flagrant green in the lily pond of a penthouse
terrace.

Once you begin to think about algas, and to look for them, you see
them everywhere. The Blue-Green Algae look, and are, slimier than the
Green. Many are poisonous; most are associated with polluted water;
their presence indicates something unhealthy — for us. They are the sort
of organisms that Aristotle, peering into his "primordial slime," con-
ceived as originating from the mud itself. But all these qualities only serve
to show from how far they have come — from a fabulous age and an
earth that would have been uninhabitable for us, when the seas were not
salt and the continents were brimstone, and the very sun looked down
with a different light in its eye.

For the blue pigment of the Blue-Greens, adapted no doubt to capture
solar energy also in a different part of the spectrum, masks the raw
green chlorophyll. True that the Blue-Greens flourish in modern sun-
light— but only in their gelatine sheath. Deprived of that, they are killed
by direct light, just as bacteria are. Indeed, these Blue-Green Algae are
next in seniority to the autotrophic bacteria, and resemble various of them
significantly. In their filamentous or spherical shape, for instance, their
slimy sheaths, their slow creep or oscillation. Too, they are devoid 01
starch, that stored wealth for man and beast, which pervades most of the
rest of the plant kingdom. And the Blue-Greens, be it noted, are, like the
bacteria, devoid of any sexual type of reproduction.

FLOWERING EARTH 353

But they have chlorophyll, they have set up in the great photosynthetic
business, and like all green water plants, they give off bubbles of oxygen.
As presumably the Blue-Greens throve in the warm, fresh seas of ancient
time, so some to this day live only in hot springs, whether at Rotorua
geyser in New Zealand, or our own Yellowstone. Endlessly rising and
dying, they deposit the weird sinter that makes the basins of the geysers
so picturesque, and they build up a sort of rubble or tufa, or become
solidified to an onyx-like travertine rock.

Or some Blue-Greens cause the "water-bloom" on pools, sometimes
identified by botanists as Aphanizomenon but known as "Fanny" by the
engineers who try to get rid of it, for it is fatal to cattle, with an unknown
poison. Some Blue-Greens are more red than green, and one of them,
prodigiously multiplying in the water between two deserts, has given the
Red Sea its ancient name.

It is like crossing the frontier into a friendly country, to leave the Blue-
Greens for the true Greens. As they form part of the grazing for so many
aquatic small fry that feed the big ones, they are indirectly useful to us;
they are the pasturage — biologists call it the plankton — of all the waters
that can sustain them. And the Greens are, as they leave the reaches in
which they resemble the bacteria-like Blue-Greens, honest plants such as
we can better understand. They do their work by clear chlorophyll, and
store starch and fats as higher plants do, and are built up of cellulose and
pecten just as are the most aristocratic trees. And, save for the most
primitive, the Greens have sex. They may be said, indeed, to have
originated it.

That plants share sex with the animal kingdom is one more proof of
the oneness of life. Yet mankind was a long time in perceiving the obvious.
The ancients grew figs and olives, apples, peaches and chestnuts, as well
as daughters, and saw that in youth their trees were barren, that they came
to flower at a certain age, and fulfilled their purpose when they bore
their fruit. And still men did not draw the simple parallel. The idea of sex
in plants was scarcely proposed until the seventeenth century and accepted
in the eighteenth only after furious opposition even from scientists.

And its purpose appears (since there are many, and very effective, non-
sexual ways in which plants can reproduce themselves) to be the renewed
vigor that comes with the conjunction of individual strains of protoplasm.
Along with that refreshment of vital energy, there is implied the com-
mingling of separate hereditary strains. Non-sexual reproduction endlessly
multiplies the old individual, with all its virtues or weaknesses. But in a
world of beings sexually divided, sexually united, enrichment is infinite,
permutation endless. So evolution, slow to gather momentum, discovering

354 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

the device of sex in the Green Algae swept forward upon its indomitable
and unpredictable flood tide.

THE SEAWEEDS

Over my study mantelpiece, where the barometer and the great triton
shells repose, is stretched the big sailing chart of this California coast
on which I live. Worked intricately as a thumb-print with soundings and
fathom lines, it shows the edge of the continent cutting across the upper
right-hand corner, and off shore, in the currents, the islands of the Santa
Barbara Channel. On clear days from my veranda, through an arch of
live-oaks I can see them rise, abrupt and purple-shadowed. For they are the
tops of an old mountain chain, and so upon the map they lie singularly
alike in shape, very much like a flight of cormorants migrating parallel
to the mainland. My eyes, so often lifting from my desk to seek them, find
them there stretching out long goosy necks that bear small heads, or, as
if foreshortened, they appear to sail upon wings edge-on. They hold the
Channel in a light embrace; outposts of terra firma in the wilderness of
sea, they temper it to inhabiting life.

On a fair day the Channel glitters azure, emerald-streaked where the
sea is so thick with the life it bears that it refracts the sunlight, red with
the moiling kelp beds, purpled by a passing cloud. Shallow, as biological
fathoms are reckoned, deep as the angler thinks of depth, dark with the
Kuro Shiwo stream that has crept here in a mighty arc from Japan.

Here off the tawny continental flank, in the lee of Santa Rosa, Santa
Cruz, San Miguel, sleeps the Pacific from May until December. The broad
ruddy band of the kelp beds, well off shore, never changes place. These
giant kelps of the California coast are the largest in the world. Elk kelp
and sea-otter's cabbage and the iodine kelp have dimensions of forest trees.
Forty and sixty feet deep they are rooted by suckering holdfasts; their
stems, flaccid but tough, may attain two hundred, three hundred feet in
length. Their foliage is ample and heavy as the leaves of a rubber tree;
they are buoyed up by double rows of bladders, or sometimes by a single
float the size of a grapefruit. Some, like the trees of earth, are permanent
perennials; in others which are annuals this leviathan growth is the work
of a single season. Upon these towering, wavering Algae — the Browns —
perch countless others, as the lianas and orchids cling upon the boughs
of the over-earth tropical forests. For the most, these clinging frailties are
Reds, and there are others of them, membranous and filigreed, that trem-
ble on the ocean floor beneath the shelter of the lofty Browns, like moss
and ferns that hug the ground between great roots. Such is the ocean

FLOWERING EARTH 355

jungle. It hangs such leathery curtains of foliage in the water and is
flung abroad like an undulant carpet so wide upon the surface, that the
fall and swell of the ocean's breathing is stilled by it. Within this
breakwater, the seas lie harbor calm.

Beneath, in the depths of the great kelp forest, the small fry dash for
shelter, in terror of swordfish and albacore and tuna. Here the crabs
nibble the algal pasturage, and the sea slugs, which mimic the colors of
the vegetation, crawl and mouth, and the kelp fish builds her nest of woven
weed. Above these beds, all summer, in a leisure that gives thieves time
to fall out, the gulls quarrel and rise, to settle again with a twinkling of
sunlit wings. Brown pelicans plunge there; black cormorants from the wild
Farallones fish these banks; loons dive with an oily ease, and sometimes a
heron stands upon the buoyed kelp tops, gazing morosely into the water.
Day after day — only calm and sunshine, kelp and fish and birds. Boats
give the beds a wide berth, for fear of the weed in their propellers;
fishermen hate it in their nets. No swimmer who loves his life would dive
in that sargasso of the great Browns, nor could he endure the pressure of
the deeps where the most fragile of all the Reds delight to live. The
Browns, with their special pigments masking the chlorophyll, go down in
the seawater till the orange and the yellow light have been filtered out.
But the Reds can carry on their photosynthesis four hundred feet below
the surface, where even the green and blue light fails, and only the violet
rays still reach the delicate mechanism. In such secrecy dwell fragile
perennials and summer annuals that live and die and are not seen by men,
it may be, for years.

But halcyon weather, even here, cannot always endure. The winter
rains come finally, and some night, after a day of grey brooding, they
begin as a scamper of drops across the roof, a wind-blown hail of acorns,
then a dance of rain, that becomes a ceaseless march. It rains till the dry
arroyos run again; it rains till the rocks roll down the brooks; it rains till
the hills begin to slide, and yet it has only begun to rain.

In January the first storm approaches. It gathers on the north Pacific,
and sweeps down even into the Channel's shelter. It troubles the seaweed
forest, then twists it and tortures it, and pulls it by the roots and breaks it.
The annuals come up, then the permanent growth. The living break-
water is broken with the waters; it is dragged up to the top, rolled in the
green jaws of the combers, and flung, fighting and slithering back in
vain, on the rocks, and pounded there. The rising tide carries it, a helpless
wrack, to the high beach where it must bleach and rot.

After such a storm I lately came to the shore. The sea was mild in a
warm sun; sails languished on the fishing banks; gulls were back on the

356 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

kelp, and the kelp was back in its place, of? shore, all but the loot flung
up, not yet reclaimed by an incoming tide.

High up under the rocks, the giant kelps and tangs were thrust into
an untouchable mound of decay that was waist high. Lower on the
strand lay the lighter jetsam, the small Browns and the many Reds, in
windrows tangled with eel grass and surf grass. Already these frail lives
of the deep were passing swiftly, blanching or blackening. For them, this
sunny air was a world too harshly illuminated, too arid for life.

But in the tide pools where they had been flung with sea urchins and
starfish, they still lived, floating out with a vitality like the moving hair
of the drowned. There I lifted wavering membranes of the edible Por-
phyras and the scarlet tousle of Plocamiums, filigree and point lace, fluted
ribbons and lappets, sea-mosses as dark as the branching stains in agate,
filmy ferns that lay upon my palm as insubstantial as the impress of a
fossil growth. They were so unbelievably thin that when I had mounted
them on stiff white paper they passed, with those who saw them, for the
stroke of a water colorist's brush.

For I carried home a vasculum full of seaweeds, and with my fingers
under water coaxed them all apart. When I had disengaged every filament
and swept it clean of grit and parasites with a fine brush, my ocean algas
emerged as lovely as are flowers. Botanically it was possible to assort and
classify them among the major types, called roughly the Greens and Reds
and Browns. But the colors were subtler than that. They were seashell
pink and sunset rose, saffron and Tyrian and smoke-velvet, tannic wood-
red, lake, carmine, verdigris, Spanish green, olive, maroon, garnet and
emerald. Only cathedral windows have such soft and glowing stains. . . .

Of all algal morasses — and there are great ones on the north coast of
Norway, in the fjords of Alaska, around New Zealand and the Great
Barrier reef, off Good Hope and Cape Horn — the most fabulous is the
Sargasso Sea. Sargassum, the Gulf weed, is not, individually, a conspicu-
ous plant. It looks rather like a sprig of holly, with crinkly leaves and
gas-filled bladders that might be mistaken for berries. Rather, the sheer
mass has given rise to the legend that ships, from the time of Columbus,
have become entangled in its gigantic eddy of stagnation and are still
wedged there, rotting at Lethe's wharf. It is certainly so dense at times
that a row boat is unable to make progress and has sometimes to be
hauled back to the mother ship.

It harbors untold billions of microscopic animals and plants, hydroids
that look like feathers, colonial creatures that resemble moss, and mol-
luscs, crabs, shrimps, seahorses, pipe-fish and other small fry without end.
Above all the Sargasso has been discovered to be the long unknown

FLOWERING EARTH 357

resort of the eels, who migrate here, mate, and die, and here their young
mature to the elver stage before they begin their incredible journey to
their parent rivers and ponds in the interior of Europe and America.

The sheer weight of the Gulf weed in the Sargasso Sea has been com-
puted at ten millions tons. It is a free-floating raft of plants, torn by
storms perhaps, from its mooring somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico and
the Caribbean and caught in the eddy of the Gulf Stream and Equatorial
counter-current. Yet one looks in vain for gigantic gardens that could
supply such an assemblage of weed. More, this vast plant drift sometimes
utterly disappears. So that several scientists, sailing by at such a time, have
"disproved" the Sargasso Sea as a myth. Others who have seen it say that
it sinks below the surface, to rise again at certain seasons. But no man
knows. The Sargasso remains one of the ancient secrets of ocean, and it
gives us some suggestion of what the seas were like in that period of
geologic time that has been named the Age of Seaweeds.

Not that then there were necessarily more, or more variety than we
know today. But there was, except for bacteria, presumably nothing else.
There may even have been no land above the waters for a long time, but
only a world sea or Panthalassa. In this shallow all-ocean the algas could
have rooted far more extensively than now. And when the continents
arose, the seaweeds in that eon that was theirs, a time longer than that
which has gone by since the first land plants appeared, were slowly
evolving toward the mastery of their environment. They were adapting
themselves to the increasing brininess of the ocean, to the conquest of the
deeps and of the tidal shores. Perhaps it was they who first set green foot
on shore, but of that we know nothing.

What we do know from the book of fossils is that the seaweeds in their
Age were developing most of the traits of plants. Starting with the slimy
Blue-Greens and the mere hair-like Greens the algas progressed through
branching, through the welding of filament to filament into a ribbon
tissue, through the layer of one tissue on another so that real body and
substance were established, till they had reached a complex structure
differentiated into definite organs like roots, leaves, stems, spore-cases and
complex sex organs. The life history of some of the highest of the Reds
is as complex as that of an orchid or a pine. In beauty and color some
Algae are, indeed, flowers of the sea; others, in bulk and height and
foliage, are the trees.

And some of these early comers have even built the land we walk on.

Their surfaces encrusted with lime, they have, by their endless living
and dying, created reefs and atolls, isles and peninsulas, and even great
limestone blankets of the continents. Animal corals get all the credit for

358 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

such architecture; the coralline Algae and others of the stony little sea-
weeds have probably done full half the work. Taking on the forms of
flat, crusty lichens, of stony feathers, of brittle jointed pink lobster feelers,
of minute mermaids' fans and mermen's shaving brushes, glove fingers
and tremulous green toadstools, these calcareous masons are growing
today beneath the clear waters of the Bay of Naples, the Great Sound of
Bermuda, the reef of Funafuti, the stagnation of the old moat around the
fortress at Key West. But they are only the living generation that exists
delicately upon the bones of their ancestors of Proterozoic times, when
layer by layer, in little swirls and knolls and bosses, they lifted the land
above the sea, and left their fossil imprint in the rocks.

For the most part, other kinds of Algae, alas, make wretched fossils.
A seaweed alive is little more than an evanescent pellicle of life surround-
ing impounded sea water; ordinarily it dies and vanishes without trace,
except for the rare exquisite impress of some Red of a vanished age, and,
occasionally, a great brown kelp like Nematophycus, one of the giants
that lolled in the seas that stood then over interior Canada. Its fossil stem
was a thing so stoutly dimensioned that it was taken, first, to be some
ancestral sort of yew bole.

But such as they are, the fossils of the Age of Seaweeds proclaim a
tremendous story of conquest, the domination of an element by life.
The sea teemed then. Yet in all that time, between half a billion and a
billion years, the face of the rock was bare. Without land plants to give
them browse, animals too were imprisoned in the sea, for it is a trap as
well as a world. The Age of Seaweeds was the age of Invertebrates. Every
order of spineless animal we know today, and many that are extinct like
the scorpion-like trilobites, flourished in those submarine gardens or
ranged the deeps and the open spaces. Jelly-fish and sea anemones, octopi
and squids, hydroids and bryozoons, sea slugs and sea snails and great
conchs, tritons, nautili, and abalones populated the algal jungles. The
lampreys, writhing and suckering, evolved, and finally even fishes. And
still life was wholly aquatic. On land was a harsher world, with drying
winds, without the old maternal medium to buoy plants, to bring them
all salts, all minerals, in its perpetual convection. But it was a much more
stimulating environment, destined to call forth great things of life and
lead it to triumph. Yet still on all the earth there was no flower and no
voice; the continents were coursed by winds that blew no one any good
and carved by rains for which there was no root or throat to be grateful.

THE FERN FORESTS

Three hundred and fifty million years ago is as far away as a star. To
describe a plant that was growing then would seem the attempt of a

FLOWERING EARTH 359

madman or a magician, so lost in time is it now. In the eons since it was
green, whole populations of plants have arisen and conquered the world
and fallen again, leaving here and there a few survivors to persist, altering
with the ages, vague reminders of what the world was like in their day.

Their day was yesterday or the day before. Three hundred and fifty
million years ago is forgotten time. It is no more than the day after the
Age of Seaweeds. No sensible every-day botanist would look about him
for evidence of what then was green, not in the growing world that is his
field. But there is another kind of botanist, extremely rare, extremely
learned, who has added to a mastery of common plant knowledge a
quarter of a century or even half a lifetime, of very special training. He is
the paleobotanist, and his task is to unriddle the rocks. He has to work
backward from the known to the obscure, by almost metaphysical detec-
tive work. His clues are appallingly few, all but hopelessly incomplete.
He is lucky if he finds any fossil showing two organs from the same plant
attached, and though he may find all the parts in separate fossils, he has
no scientific right to put them together. Rather he must fit each faint
evidence into its one right place in the whole enormous picture — the vast
evolutionary system of plant history, the vanished floras of any one of a
billion years of life on earth.

Even to examine this evidence would appear a task of crushing tedium.
After your paleobotanist has climbed cliffs, or descended into coal mines,
or lowered himself into quarries, after he has come staggering home
from some ledgy glen with his knapsack bulging with heavy specimens,
he sorts out the clattering haul in a rough fashion. Very commonly he
has to slice his rocks into thin sections for microscopic examination. A
rotary saw covered with diamond dust is used for this, and the art of it
consists in cutting in the right plane. Then the fragile slice is secured to
glass, the surface is polished down with carborundum until it is so thin
that it is transparent; this film of rock is mounted under Canada balsam,
and the paleobotanist has his specimen ready for examination. From it,
referring to the colossal amount of information on plant structure on file
in his brain, concerning seeds, pollen grains, spores, cones, leaves, cross-
section patterns of twigs or stems, he may be able to supply his fragment
with an idea of the rest of its parts.

Among these detectives of the vanished, these pioneers into the remote
past, a great name is that of Sir John William Dawson. Eighty years ago
Sir John was cracking rocks and pawing over the fragments on the Gaspe
peninsula of Canada, when he came on a fossil fragment in a stratum of
early Devonian age, that gave him a start. He was a God-fearing, Bible-
swearing gentleman who did not, in that year of grace 1859, take any
stock in Mr. Darwin's blasohemv about the descent of man. But he was a

360 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

good paleobotanist, for all of that, and when he found a land plant square
in the middle of the Age of Seaweeds, he knew he had made a discovery.

He took his stony fragment home to Nova Scotia, where he was born,
and went to work on it. Neither mad nor a magician, he dared to look
back three hundred and fifty million years, and see what must have been
growing then. He was so sure of what he saw that he could take up a
pencil and draw it. I have that picture before me. It is a picture of the
earliest known plant upon the earth. Sir John called it Psilophyton, which
means "naked plant." Very naked it looks, very new for all it is so old —
a skinny, wiry, straggling thing, no more than the dim beginning of an
idea for a plant. Which is just about what it was.

The shoot seems to have been scarcely a foot in height; it had a bit of
underground stem without roots; it had branches, but without leaves,
and at the tips of them it bore spore cases (for it was to be ages before
seeds fell upon the ready earth). This thing, this meagre, venturesome,
growing and certainly green thing, lost in the interminable darknesses of
time gone by, came alive again in the mind of Sir John William Dawson.

Too lively, his imagination! said his colleagues to one another. Psilo-
phyton, it was smilingly decided, never grew anywhere outside of his
head. For more than fifty years the drawing was thought of as a curiosity,
a scribbling without scientific value.

One day, in the terrible year of 1915, when the English and Germans
were dying at Ypres and the French and Germans at Artois, two British
paleobotanists, over-age for service, were plying their peaceable if unap-
preciated trade in the mountains of Aberdeenshire, when they unearthed
a Devonian marsh, turned by time into a dark chippy sort of flint called
chert, and full of fossils. This bog, when it was a bog, must have been
close to the ocean, although the village of Rhynie, hard by, is now thirty
miles from the North Sea and well up in the hills. So Robert Kidston
and William Lang called the first of their plants to be described, Rhynia.

They saw that Rhynia must have grown very thickly in the bog, in a
green swale like rushes in a marsh today; they saw that it stood about
eight inches high, that it had neither leaves nor roots but only under-
ground stems and rootlets, that it bore spore cases — that it was, indeed,
so like Sir John William Dawson's drawing of the imaginary Psilophyton
that Psilophyton must have been very real indeed.

And in the years since, it has turned up in fossil at points so far scat-
tered as Connecticut, Maine, Scotland, Wales, Germany, and Victoria
in Australia. No doubt any more of Dawson's bold guess, no doubt of
the importance of Psilophyton, the "naked plant," the first known plant

FLOWERING EARTH 361

citizen in the land. Spores like a fern's give hint, in this bleak tentative
little ancestor, of great things to come.

They came with the centuries, the hundreds of centuries, the measures
of time that we can deal with only as we riffle the leaves of a book.
Through the flicker of those eons we get a glimpse of landscape, tundra-
like, bog-like, clothed in a harsh and stunted flora all a dead level of
green. Pattern of leaf or color of flower there was none. But green, with
its attendant bronze and grey of decay to lower the key, green creeping
over the land, irresistible as today's ivy that splits the stones, ultimate as
the grass on our graves.

And time, time flowing serenely by, in the millions of tranquil years
of the Middle Devonian. There were no great mountains then arising;
the continents seem even to have subsided, around their edges, letting in
the shallow seas where the fierce Devonian fishes swam and the coral
reefs grew higher and the great brown seaweed rolled. Where Pennsyl-
vania is tossed up today into limestone folds, the country was flat and
marshy as lowland South Carolina, and there the oils and natural gas
were gathering under the subterranean domes of rock. Seams of coal
were forming in the plant-choked lakes of Germany and China. Every-
where there was an immense and ever increasing growth, a constant
forward surge of the Green Kingdom. Gone are rootless, naked, stunted,
rushy Psilophyton and all its cretin kind. Little trees take their place.
And larger trees. Woody tissue increases, strengthens, solves the momen-
tous task of all land plants, of lifting water dead against gravity. A sea-
weed can loll in the water, buoyed by it and even saturate with it. A tree
must hold aloft its crown of leaves and top-heavy branches; it must defy
the storms, and supply its ultimate bud and leaf with water. Already the
new environment is calling forth from resourceful life a magnificent
effort in response.

And always, you must remember, there were spores, sowing the wind,
and falling in the water. Spores fine as pollen, fine as ash; spores big and
heavy as seeds. Some spores that actually were seeds. Spores by the million
from a single spore case, spores by the billion from a single plant. Spores
in astronomical figures, in numbers carried to a power to stagger mathe-
maticians, sowing the wind and the wave and the earth, recklessly wasted,
yet indomitably fertile. They alighted without sound, yet it was, for all
that, a mighty footfall.

By the Late or Upper Devonian times, some seventy-five million years
after naked Psilophyton put in its shy appearance, green life is no longer
uncertain of itself on land, in the new trying element of air. Already the
descendants of Psilophyton have diverged along widely different lines.

362 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

Like the builders of the tower of Babel, they started out with much in
common, but time parts them; they are no longer near of kin; they speak
different tongues, turn backs, move to the four quarters of plant destiny —
true fern, club-moss, conifer and seed-fern. All four are found in Late
Devonian fossils. And each in turn is destined to its day. Three will rise
and fall. One, the last, the dark horse among them, whose very existence
was unrecognized until a few years ago because its fossils were grouped
among the true ferns, will emerge triumphant as the ancestor of our living
flora.

But in this antiquity, eternal slow and all but fathomless, the first golden
age of the plants rose with the ferns and the club-mosses — rose into the
stately swampy forests of the great Carboniferous Age. This was the
classic period. From this our own industrial modernity actually stems.
Yet there was not then so much as a groping scheme for the man-like in
anything living. Only a vast lush growing, over the earth. The climate
of what is now the United States was tropical; delicate tree ferns flour-
ished within a few degrees of the poles, long as must, even then, have
been the polar nights. The very air was not the clear American atmos-
phere we breathe; it must have been more heavily blanketed with mois-
ture and carbon dioxide that kept the earth's heat close under an almost
permanent cloud.

Those paleobotanists, chipping and peering, have discovered in the
rocks as many as a thousand species of Carboniferous plants. They are
all gone today; only a few dwindled descendants show the power of
continuity. In the horsetails by the marsh, little and harsh like stemfuls of
soft pine needles, persist all the traits of forest-tall, ancestral Calamites
of the Coal Age. Calamites had a trunk like a tall pine, then, and leaves
in tufts; it left a long reflection in the stagnant water. But when today
a muskrat drops into a pond bordered with horsetails they tremble at
the ripple. Peasants use them for scraping the grease of pots and pans,
call them scouring rushes, fling them, ignominious with the bacon fat,
into the fire. So low have the descendants of great Calamites fallen.

If you walk in our northern pine woods, if you have an eye to subtle
beauty, you know Lycopodium, that trails its stems like a cedar garland
along the ground; they call it club-moss or ground pine. Nevertheless it
is neither moss nor pine but a fugitive and prostrated collateral descendant
of a tree that in the Coal Age grew to a hundred feet and more, straight
up. Four feet thick it grew, rough-scaled like an alligator's skin, and it
clutched the still queasy earth with a mighty root system. There were
plants whose branches drifted in the water, and climbing ferns, and
broad lowlier fronds to make an undergrowth beneath the soaring boles

FLOWERING EARTH 363

of these great lycopods. Light shafted between them misty with the ever-
lasting vapor; the silence must have hung as heavy as a pall. For there was
not a bird in all that forest to lift the voice -of hope; there was not a fur-
bearer, with a drop of the milk of mother-kindness. Between earth and
water lived amphibian things, newt-like, eel-like, dragging their elon-
gated shapes, as much as eight feet long, upon the new experiment of legs.
The hot damp air was stirred by insect life, primitive but already boldly
ambitious. There were roaches to the hundreds of species, some of them
gigantic, and crawling forms foreshadowing bugs and termites, and
through those steamy forest depths there darted a dragon fly with a wing-
spread of thirty inches. Never in the ages since have the insects equalled
that for size.

That world that was seems less believable than a nightmare on waking.
Yet not only are the rocks written with witness to it, but it was the very
source, the immediate prompting, of today's civilization. When it was
discovered that coal could smelt iron, human history turned its course,
following the vein laid down in the Carboniferous era. The ships of
England began carrying coal from Newcastle. Manchester rose from its
sleepy peace to become one of the greatest and grimiest cities in the world.
Mauch Chunk, in Pennsylvania, where Audubon hunted bears, turned
in his lifetime into a labor-troubled colliery. Settlers ripped the virgin
prairie sod from Illinois and laid bare its soft bituminous beds. German
steel mills blackened the skies under which Goethe had dreamed Roman-
tic Natural philosophy. Women stevedores of Nagasaki ran panting with
black diamonds on their backs, unloading the dirty British collier. Cot-
tage industry gave way before the factory. Coal-poor nations paid yellow
earth metal for this dirty black mineral that made the wheels of the
world go around.

Long the geologists had no clear notion what coal was made of. Or-
ganic its origin certainly was. But who could see details in a lump of
mineralized midnight? It was one of my old teachers who literally made
coal transparent. He worked for fifteen years before he learned the secret
of softening and bleaching coal.

His method is to soak his specimen for two years in chlorate of soda
dissolved in concentrated hydrofluoric acid. At the end of that time this
patient man has it washed all one night in slowly running water, then in
strong alcohol and after that in carbolic acid. Then again it is cleansed
with water, and the now merely clouded and much mollified lump of
antiquity is imbedded in nitrocellulose and sliced one twelve-thousandth
of an inch thin.

In the high-ceiled dinginess of his cluttered little north room, this

364 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

professorial collier let us look into his microscope at such coal shavings
magnified five hundred times. He had specimens from all over the world
— Pocahontas anthracite, Kentucky cannel or "coal of the long flame,"
as the French call it, soft bituminous carbon from the man-killing mines
of Illinois, paper coals from Russia. And we were botanists enough to
see at a glance into the truth of them. Charred cellulose; club-moss spores
with their unmistakable three furrows; tree fern wood crushed by the
terrible pressure of the centuries piled upon it. All the forests of the
Carboniferous era, jumbled and charred and tortured, but legible still
as plant life.

The circumstances that conspired to lock up such treasure are several.
Water was its first keeper; under water the bacteria and fungi do not
comparably attack dead wood. The wooden piles under the city of
Venice have been found to be intact after a thousand years; cypress wood
— wood still, not fossil — is dug out of Maryland swamps where cypress
no longer grows, and it is still uninjured after an estimated ten thousand
years.

The second keeper of the treasure was fire. Lightning or spontaneous
combustion seem forever to have started great conflagrations among the
inflammable lycopods, and by charring the outside tissue, the fire saved
the surface from decay and so saved all.

Lastly, time and the weight of earth went to the making of coal. Upon
the accumulating beds of plant detritus poured endlessly the silt and mud
of the rivers. The oceans came and went, over the fallen forests, and the
terrific weight of their waters caused a very heat of pressure that car-
bonized the sinking wealth which once was life.

But why did they fall, those forests? Why did a dynasty mighty enough
to conquer earth vanish utterly from it?

They grew too great, perhaps; it may be that they brought their own
downfall. Times change, we say; the very climate of the world changed
then. A cold breath of disaster blew down upon the tropical plant kings;
the first winter of the world was coming, and their time was done. . . .

From the South Pole the glaciers moved inexorably forward; they drove
much further toward the equator than the northern hemisphere glacier
that came in the time of man, for they were much bigger and more
aggressive. Before their icy breath the sultry jungles of the Carboniferous
withered. They were gripped by the bitter death of freezing and by the
slow death of drought. For the waters of which they had so prodigal
a need were locked in the ever increasing ice fields. The very level of the
oceans must have fallen; the marshes must have shrunken, the air have
lost its steamy richness upon which had floated the olden spores.

FLOWERING EARTH 365

This the fern forests could not survive; here was revealed the fatal
weakness of the very elaboration of their development. For the life history
of a fern (and of a horsetail and a club-moss) has two separate phases,
called the alternation of generations. The first is the plant we see, non-
sexual, simply bearing spores. But the spores, when they germinate, do
not give rise to more ferns, but to the second phase, the sexual. In this,
the fern appears as insignificant as a lichen, but its tiny flat body bears the
male and female sex organs; from these spring the fern form again.

The male cells, with their lashing tails, can only reach the egg cells if
they can swim to them. They cannot cross dry land; they are not adapted
to air travel, like spores. Even a rainy day, even a film of dew, may suffice
to make possible the fertilization of the dainty little ferns of today. But
the gigantic ferns and fern-allies of the Carboniferous, to keep alive and
to complete their life cycle, required water and more water, a world that
was a sodden plenty of it. And it failed them; the carbon dioxide failed
them; the glaciers advanced, and cold dry winds blew them no luck from
any quarter. Over-specialized, over-tender, spendthrift of their grandeur,
the Carboniferous plants went down like a civilization that has itself
created the Nemesis by which it is destroyed.

But life is never really routed. After the glaciers had withdrawn, a new
flora spread everywhere, with the swiftness of a foot-loose horde. It was
wrought out of the passing ferns, but it was hardy, fecund and aggressive.
It was a low and weedy growth fit to face the bluster of the bleak day;
there is evidence of it even on fossils from Antarctica, found in the col-
lections of Captain Scott's tragic expedition.

Nor was this coarse and sturdy rabble all that grew. The race of conifers
was pushing up; the seed-ferns had given rise, before they perished, to a
new line, more gloriously destined than any other though still only grop-
ing its way toward flowers and fruit. But the first golden age — some un-
wintered confidence, some unchecked and monstrous extravagance —
was over.

CONIFERS AND CYCADS

At the end of May, when I haunted the Lompoc ranges, the best of the
season was already over. It is a curious countryside, unlike any other in
America that I know, salt but dry, sunny with a wash of fog over the
sunshine. On the grassy polished hills and across the open heath-like
scrub the bird life is especially easy to see and hear. The lupine had been
glorious in flower, a month before, sweeping the land in patches the
purple-blue color of shadow, the poppies running beside them like molten
metal. Then uprose those foreign invaders, the wild oats and mustard.

366 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

Now they too were bronzing in the march of the summer days. The
brooks dwindled to a whisper; the cattle lazed in the deep shade of the
live oaks that cluster in the folds of the hills and climb toward the top
with their peculiar grace of following the land's contour in harmonious
slopes of their own. In the pines there was no shade, only the desultory
sizzling of some little bird that eluded me. I was in that first dazed spell
of an oncoming southern summer, when the air is full of the dusty
incense of hay and the insect thunder of bees who can find no more
opening flowers. It is time to go, then, but you have already lost your
will to go, consenting with indolence to stay and be withered.

But anywhere in this state you are likely to remember some other place
in it as beautiful as the spot where you are standing, and utterly different.
So there came down to me from the high places something less sensible
than a wind, but as strong and sudden, urging and reviving me. Once
your mind quits one place for another, you stifle if you lag behind it.
When I had no liberty but a fortnight doled out annually, when I had no
car and all the children were little, I had to stay behind, wherever my
thoughts went. I lived through the attacks, then, in situ, but now I like
to think that there is no cure for me but to go. ...

So we made a prompt start that morning, with little ceremony about
it but with some reverence preparing in us, for we went to visit giants in
the earth. Of all that has survived from the Mesozoic, which began two
hundred million years ago and ended about 55,000,000 B.C., Sequoia is the
king. It is so much a king that, deposed today from all but two corners
of its empire, superseded, outmoded, exiled and all but exterminated, it
still stands without rival. And from all over the world, those who can
make the pilgrimage come sooner or later to its feet, and do it homage.

Of Sequoia there are two species left, though once they were as various
and abundant as are today the pines, their lesser brothers. One is the
coastal redwood of California, which is the tallest tree in the world, and
the other is the Big Tree of the Sierra Nevada, which is the mightiest in
bulk. These two surviving species were here before the last glacial period.
But as a genus or clan of species Sequoia has its roots in a day of fabulous
eld. This noble line knew the tyrant lizards; through its branches swept
the pterodactyls on great batty wings. As they saw the coming of the first
birds, crawling up out of lizard shapes, so the forebears of our Sequoia
witnessed the evolution of the first mammals when these still laid eggs,
when they were low-skulled opossum-like things, when they became scut-
tling rodents that perhaps, gnawing and sucking at dinosaur eggs, brought
down that giant dynasty from its very base.

Sequoia as a tribe saw the rise of all the most clever and lovely types

FLOWERING EARTH 367

of modern insects — the butterflies and moths, the beetles and bees and
ants. Yet since there were then none of the intricate inter-relationships
that have developed between modern flower and modern bee, Sequoia
sowed the wind. It had flowers of an antique sort, flowers by technical
definition, at least; petals and scent they had none. But their pollen must
have been golden upon that ancient sunlight, and the communicable
spark of futurity was in it. For Sequoia towers still upon its mountain
top, and I was going there. . . .

It is a long climb still through the foothills of the Sierra. But now I sit
up, with a lifted face. Beyond, higher in the east, portent is gathering. It
takes shape, cloud-colored, gleaming with a stern reality where the sun
smites a rocky forehead. Then appears that eternally moving miracle-
snow in the summer sky. Sierra Nevada. . . .

The forests march upon the car; the ruddy soaring trunks of the sugar
pines close around in escort. One hundred and two hundred feet over-
head, their foliage is not even visible, screened by the lower canopy
spread by western yellow pines which are giants in themselves. Groves of
white fir, smelling like Christmas morning, troop between the yellow
pines. Aisles of incense cedar with gracious down-sweeping boughs and
flat sprays of gleaming foliage invite the eye down colonnaded avenues,
fragrance drifting from their censers that appear to smoke with the long
afternoon light. It grows darker with every mile, darker and deeper in
moss and lichen, dim with the dimness of a vanished era. We have got
back into earliest spring, at this altitude, and the blossoming dogwood
troops along, illuminating the dusky places with a white laughter.

. . . Now, as the land of sunny levels has fallen remotely out of sight,
there is a prescience in the cold air, of grandeur. We have climbed into
the shadows; the drifts of snow are thicker between great roots, and
richer grows the livid green mantle of staghorn lichen that clothes all
Sierra wood in green old age. The boles of the sugar pines, which are
kings, give place before the coming of an emperor. The sea sound of the
forest deepens a tone in pitch. The road is twisting to find some way
between columns so vast they block the view. They are not in the scale
of living things, but geologic in structure, fluted and buttressed like
colossal stone work, weathered to the color of old sandstone. They are
not the pillars that hold up the mountains. They are Sequoia. The car
has stopped, and I am standing in the presence.

Centuries of fallen needles make silence of my step, and the command
upon the air, very soft, eternal, is to be still. I am at the knees of gods.
I believe because I see, and to believe in these unimaginable titans
strengthens the heart. Five thousand years of living, twelve million

368 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

pounds of growth out o£ a tiny seed. Three hundred vertical feet of
growth, up which the water travels every day dead against gravity from
deep in the great root system. Every ounce, every inch, was built upward
from the earth by the thin invisible stream of protoplasm that has been
handed down by the touch of pollen from generation to generation, for
a hundred million years. Ancestral Sequoias grew here before the Sierra
was uplifted. Today they look down upon the plains of men. No one
has ever known a Sequoia to die a natural death. Neither insects nor
fungi can corrupt them. Lightning may smite them at the crown and
break it; no fire gets to the heart of them. They simply have no old age,
and the only down trees are felled trees.

In their uplifted hands they permit the little modern birds, the passerine
song birds, vireos and warblers, tanagers and thrushes, to nest and call.
I heard, very high above me in the luminous glooms, voices of such as
these. I saw, between the huge roots that kept a winter drift, the snow-
plant thrust through earth its crimson fist. A doe — so long had I stood still
— stepped from behind the enormous bole and, after a long dark liquid
look, ventured with inquiring muzzle to touch my outheld hand. Bright
passing things, these nestle for an hour in the sanctuary of the strong and
dark, the vast and incalculably old.

That day I stood upon a height in time that let me glimpse the Meso-
zoic. It followed the Coal Age, the age of the fern forests, and it was itself
the age of Gymnosperms. Sequoias are Gymnosperms. So are the pines,
the larches, spruces, fir, yew, cypress, cedar — all that we call conifers,
though there are other Gymnosperms that do not bear cones.

The Gymnosperms are, literally translating, "the naked-seeded" plants.
For their seed is not completely enclosed in any fruit or husk, as it is in
the higher modern plants that truly fruit and flower. Neither is the
Gymnosperm egg or ovule completely enclosed in an ovary, as in the
true flowers. To make an analogy, you could say that the Gymnosperms
are plants without wombs, while the Angiosperms, the true flowering
plants with genuine fruits, are endowed with that engendering sanctuary.

But though the seeds of the Gymnosperms are naked, they are seeds,
and the seed is mightier than the spore. For the seed contains an embryo.
Spores are very many and very small; they blow lightly about the world
and find a lodging easily. But the seed is weighted with a great thing.
Within even the tiniest lies the germ of a fetal plantlet, its fat cotyledons
or first baby leaves till crumpled in darkness, its primary rootlet ready
to thrust and suckle at the breast of earth.

This vital secret was inherited from the seed-ferns, back in misty days
when the ferns were paramount. The conifers bore it forward; the true

FLOWERING EARTH 369

flowering plants were to carry it on and spread it in blossoming glory.
Of that there was no sign in the Mesozoic forests. They must have been
dark with an evergreen darkness, upright with a stern colonnaded strength.
For they developed the power of building wood out of earth, not the
punky wood of the tree ferns, but timber as we know it.

And we know no timber like the conifers'. No other trees are cut on
such a scale. Where they grow, wooden cities swiftly rise, railroads are
bent to them, mushroom fortunes arise from them, great fleets are built
to export them. Scandinavia is one vast lumber camp, supplying western
Europe; Port Oxford cedar of Oregon crosses the ocean in a perpetual
stream of logs, supplying Japan and China; Kauri pines of New Zealand
feed the wood hunger of barren Australia. The world's books and news-
papers are printed on coniferous pulp; it is driving silk and cotton to the
wall, as sources of cellulose and textile fibre. For beautiful grains, for
capacity to take stains, the evergreen woods are incomparable. The living
conifers are to us what the dead coal forests are.

But they can be replenished. They can be grown and cut as crops, and
they yield a profit on poor sandy and rocky soil, or in swampy lands
where no other crop could be hopefully tilled. Thrifty, fertile, tough,
industrial, they are of all trees the most practical. Ancient in lineage
beyond all others, they rise tall and straight in the pride of their aristoc-
racy. Sea-voiced, solemn, penciled against the sky, their groves are poetic
as no leafier places. Conifers stand in the sacred temple yards of Japan,
where, with venerating care, their old limbs are supported by pillars.
They line the solemn approaches to tne tombs of the Chinese emperors
at Jehol. Solomon sought them in the peaks of Lebanon for his temple.
But in all the world there are none like those in our western states.

And it was in the Black Hills of Wyoming that a fragment of the
Mesozoic lay hidden till the days when the West came to be called new
country. Miners on their way to Deadwood, cowboys riding herd, found
strange stone shapes, and broke of? fragments. What lay in those calloused
brown fingers, turned over curiously, ignorantly, was once sprung in the
Gothic glooms of the Mesozoic forests. These were cycads, a kind of
Gymnosperm which must have formed the undergrowth of those prehis-
toric coniferous woods, hundreds and hundreds of species of them. A few
linger today, scattered thinly over the tropics of the world. Some call
them sago-palms; they have an antique look, stiff, sparse and heavy;
crossed in pairs upon a coffin, they impart a funebrial dignity. Cretin of
stature, for the most part, growing sometimes only six feet in a thousand
years, they are beloved in the Japanese dwarf horticulture, cherished in

370 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

family pride there, since a cycad of even moderate size may represent a
long domestic continuity.

What pride, then, and what a ring of age was there in the first set of
fossil cycads from the Black Hills rim to reach the men of science at the
National Museum in 1893! Professor Lester Ward hastened to the field,
and what he found there, besides the bones of a great dinosaur and the
petrified logs of old conifers, were not imprints but complete petrifactions.
Atom by atom the living tissue had been replaced by stone. Here were
hundreds of fruits, all the leaves a gloating paleobotanist could desire,
perfect trunks, every detail of wood structure preserved, and dozens of
species, some dwarf, some colossal.

Ward took back with him what he could. Other students hurried to
the find; Yale and the Universities of Iowa and Wyoming have great
collections from Deadwood, and the government museums too. Tourists
carted away entire specimens, and what remained might have been
utterly scattered and destroyed, had not Professor G. R. Wieland saved
the last rich tract in the Black Hills. Close to the mountain where Borg-
lum carved his heroic profiles, the scientist filed on the area under the
homestead laws, and then presented his claim to his country. It has since
been made Cycad National Monument.

These cycads, when the world was young and they were flourishing,
must have brought into the dark monotony of the evergreen forests the
first bright splashes of color. For the seeds of cycads are gorgeous scarlet
or yellow or orange, borne on the edge of the leaf or commonly in great
cones. They are sweet and starchy to the taste, and perhaps Archaeo-
pteryx, that first feathered bird in all time, crunched them in the teeth
that he still kept, reminder of his lizard ancestry. So, it may be, the earliest
animals came to aid in the dissemination of plants, as squirrels do today,
and birds. Somehow, at least, the cycads over-ran the world. Their reign
had grandeur, but its limits narrowed. There is evidence that some of the
Mesozoic cycads flowered only at the end of their immensely long lives —
a thousand years, perhaps. Then, after one huge cone of fruit was set,
the plant died to the very root. A hero's death, but a plan ill fit to breed
a race of heroes. In the cupped hand of the future lay other seeds, with a
fairer promise.

THE RISE OF THE MODERN FLORAS

For every man there is some spot on earth, I think, which he has
pledged himself to return to, some day, because he was so happy there
once. Even to long for it is holiday of a sort. These visits of revery may
be all that he can pay it, for years, perhaps until his shade is free to haunt

FLOWERING EARTH 371

where it pleases. But some are lucky; some get back, and find it, to every
trembling leaf and stanch old tree trunk, untouched by any alteration but
the seasons'.

My place, my chosen bailiwick in the hereafter, is in the Appalachian
country, field of my earliest forays when I turned plantsman at twenty.
Those mountains, the oldest on the face of the continent, are the kindest.
They are blue with the haze of southern warmth, covered with a rustling
mantle of shade, abloom in spring, full of falls and brooks where the
white quartz gleams, as good as diamonds to any child. And I was a
child there. So when I go back, it seems like home, all over again each
time.

But the home core of it lies under no roof but the Carolina sky. It has
walls, yes, high rocky ones that pocket fern and orchis, saxifrage and
trillium, and it is inhabited, not only by the cardinal and thrush, but by
a minor deity of its own. She is a waterfall, white, radiant, immortal if
not living, and she is always there for me when I go back.

I was away from her for many years, but I had the place by heart.
During that long absence there came to me a request for a report of my
Carolina glen, and there on the other side of the ocean, amid the hot dust
of Mediterranean hills, I was able to compose from memory a list — a
florula, as botanists call it — of all that grew beside the falls. Verifying
it years later, on an exile's return, I found I had omitted only two species.

For there is a particularity about the flora of that ancient mountain
chain. It has no parallel, as I have said, save in high places in China and
Japan. But it is esoteric in more than range; it is the last stand of what
I have called the Renaissance of plant life. After the pillared glooms of
the Mesozoic forests, after the day of conifer might and cycad ascendancy,
the first great flowering of the world began. Through the Tertiary, the
last age of antiquity, the eon before modernity dawned, this experiment
of blossoming went on. And what grew then, all over a world that was
warmer than ours and spared our harsh extremes, was very much the same
flora that nods and glistens in the spray of my laughing falls.

Never in time before had the forests bloomed or spread broad, filmy
and deciduous leaves. And neither in all storied Europe nor in our own
magnificent West is there today a living grace like that of the Appala-
chian woods in spring. My glen is a temple of it, the waterfall niched
in the far heart. To reach it, I used to take the nine o'clock local from
the Piedmont village; with the help of two engines to drag us up the
steepest grade east of the Rockies, the train would attain the water tank
in fifteen minutes, and stop there, panting, to drop the extra engine.
I dropped off there, too. And when the train, wagging its dragon tail,

372 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

had vanished, I was alone with April. In the morning freshness there
was no sound but the music of leaves, and the rushing of many confluent
brooks. Cross a meadow, and there was the entrance to the glen, screened
in sunny greenery. At once the smell of lichen and loam and fern blew
out to me, sharpened with the honeyed odor of azaleas, and I always
stopped a minute just to listen with closed eyes, and to draw a deep
breath of happiness.
Then the glen once more received me.

Hours like those make no saga. Eventless in their perfection, they can-
not be communicated like a tale. There is nothing to tell but how the
sunlight is green-filtered and cool with the breath of falling water, how
the trail follows the stream up and up, over fallen logs, with the summons
of the hidden cascade rushing ever louder in your ears, and the sense of
green, light-hearted sacrosanct deepening as the rock walls rise. How
when you thirst there, you drink from cupped hands at that spring that
gushes from the brow of a rock to drum in a perpetual shower upon the
Euclidian beauty of trillium. The trilliums there have different odors that
are in my nostrils now as I remember — one smelled of roses, one of
honey, one of bay rum, one of crushed strawberries, one had no scent,
and the last perfume I can neither describe nor forget, for it was loveliest
of all.

This is not science; this is trifling with the great plant story I have set
out to tell. But, I tell you, just to remember that place is holiday for me.
There was no time there, except, far and lonely through the leaves, the
whistle of the noon train coming down, when I would know I could let
myself eat lunch at last, on the broad rock table at the foot of the falls.
After all, there was not much science then for me in the glen, in those
boyhood visits that I remember best. But I carried into it, along with
my vasculum for collecting, just enough knowledge to set all I saw alight
with realization. I knew I stood amid the purest example of the plant life
of another age left in the world today. I was learning to name everything
I touched or smelled or saw abloom high overhead, like the white fragrant
bells of the sourwood swinging seventy-five feet above me, loud with the
eagerness of bees. I knew the redbud by its rose-magenta flowers like
small butterflies, the buckeye lifting its turrets of pale yellow blossoms,
the silver-bell tree hanging drooping clusters. Dogwood of course I knew,
and azalea, rhododendron, mountain laurel; some species of all these are
tall as trees in my glen. Taller trees stand protector, soft magnolias and
hard maples with scarlet flowers, black gums and sweet gums, tulip
trees, hickories, and butternuts of the indelible dye, that stains the fingers
still as once it dyed the shirts of Jackson's fighting hosts.

FLOWERING EARTH 373

The glen was my book, that April I was twenty. I idled over it, watch-
ing the rhododendron snow its petals on the dark pools that spun them
round in a swirl of brown foam and beached them on a tiny coast glitter-
ing with mica and fool's gold. But I got it by heart, the dripping rocks,
the ferny grottos, the eternal freshness, the sense of loam, of deep sweet
decay, of a chain of life continuous and rich with the ages. The walking
fern I gathered there, that walks across its little forest world by striking
root with its long tips, tip to root and root to tip walking away from the
localities that knew it once, has its oriental counterpart; of that I was
aware. And I knew that Shortia, the flower that was lost for a century
after Michaux found it "dans les hautes montagnes de Carolinie," has its
next of kin upon the mountains of Japan. Sometimes I met mountain
people hunting ginseng for the Chinese market; long ago the Chinese all
but exterminated that herbalistic panacea of theirs, and now they turn
for it to the only other source, the Appalachians.

Later I came to understand what mighty upheavals of the earth, what
changes in the world's weather had scattered this once wide-spread flora
and locked it away in mountains an ocean and a continent apart. Once
the Appalachian-Oriental forests overspread the whole of the north tem-
perate world. Witness of that has been found in amber cast up from the
Baltic, blossoms of the Tertiary lying imprisoned there in a waxen per-
fection. Again at the village of Florissant, in Colorado, a fossil flora rich
in Appalachian and tropical types tells how different then was the lie of
the land and the very air that blew over it.

For in that pre-Adamite day the earth was a more equable sort of
place, and the pattern of its lands was more solid and more even. Tropic
and arctic both were tempered. It was a genial and cosmopolitan world;
tree fern and laurel reached to Greenland, and the elephant and the camel
and the tiger lived in the United States. For millions of years a lush and
sprightly plant life labored untroubled in the sun, laying down the soft
Tertiary coals that today are found so widely in western America.

But it was a young world still, and not a settled one. One by one the
land bridges of the continents began to break, isolating Madagascar from
India, cutting off Australia from Asia. The Antarctic bridges sank be-
neath the sea, and the great North Atlantic bridge went too.

And as the land sank, elsewhere it rose, in impassable mountain bar-
riers. The Rockies rose, tilting up the trans-Mississippi plains with them,
giving us the prairies and Pike's Peak. In time, in many millennia, the
Sierra Nevada was in its turn thrust up; it caught the Great Basin be-
tween its snows and the Rockies, and turned it into a desert. In South
America the Andes shouldered high through the old tropical rain forest.

374 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

The Himalayas were lifted from the hot Gangetic jungles. In Europe
the Alps came into being.

All over the world the temperature must have begun to go down, as
the glaciers gathered. Winters lasted longer, frost came earlier. The
banner of autumn colors, perhaps, was hung for the first time in those
earliest deciduous woods. And now, when England was covered with
mountains of ice, and woolly mammoths and mastodons, bison and
reindeer and the fierce dire wolves were roaming France, a creature called
Pithecanthropus erectus made his low-browed appearance.

In that uneasy world, the glaciers came and went perhaps four times.
Tundras and bogs full of peat moss and reindeer lichen bordered those
ice fields. Dust bowls of wind-blown loess filled central Europe and our
West and Middle West. Rockies and Alps and Sierra wore immense ice
caps almost to their bases. All that was soft and fair and genial in the
old Tertiary flora was killed, or driven into refuges like far China or my
Blue Ridge hills. And man, who is always at his best in hard times,
lighted his first camp fires against the great winter of the Pleistocene
glacial period.

Fire, the fire of life, leaps to its every chance. Quench it here, its seed
springs there, and races in conquering flame on every lucky wind. None
more indomitable than the green fire of plant life. Adjusting to drought
and cold, to sopping bog and bleak desert, it caught hold, seized its
chances, and evolved into that triumphant conflagration we may call the
Great Northern Flora.

It covers Europe today, Iceland and what little of Greenland is not still
wrapped in its particular ice age; it ranges across Siberia, Alaska and
Canada, and has found its way deep into the United States; it is, in the
temperate zone, the modern flora. Like much else in modern life, it is
strong, dominant, aggressive, not built to last but to catch as catch can.
It is for a short life and a flowery one; it runs to annuals and low soft
perennials, to high fertility and modest living standards. At its best it is
beautiful, with the brave beauty of Canterbury bells of Transylvania,
lupines of California, foxgloves of England, golden daisies of the prairies.
It can be ugly, with the pushing coarseness of pigweed and tumbleweed
and burdock. It can overrun the territory it claims by mob rule, a rabble
of dandelions crowding in the lawn, blue devil deviling the farmer,
arrogant thistles of Europe taking the pampas over, mile by mile, and
gorse, thorn-armed and bannered with showy blossoms, driving the
almost Mesozoic timid flora of New Zealand back into a last stand in the
mountains.

When the glaciers caught the Tertiary vegetation between their ice

FLOWERING* EAR33I 375

and the impassable barriers represented by Alps, Mediterranean and
Sahara, they crushed out its delicate life. Let tiie patricians fall, and the
plebeians rise up, vigorous with those hardier virtues that are bred in a
long cruel competition. They must have lain potential in the older, more
primitive Tertiary families, but suppressed, throughout the days of its
pride, like the fertile lowly in some ancient oligarchic civilization.

The plants that repopulated Europe came out of the Russian steppes,
out of the Caucasus, that cradle of races, out of what are today the many-
peopled, many-tongued Balkans, and the Siberian forests and high
Asiatic plateaux. They filled Europe with a colorful polyarchy of innu-
merable tribes, each forced to excel the others in fertility and armament,
defense and aggression. They invaded all environments, called to aid
ancient wind and modern insects, even birds to pollinate them. Some
are so vital that they will do without pollination and yet set seed. There
is no end to the cunning of their devices of penetration : winged seeds and
barbed seeds, and creeping roots throwing up endless suckers. With
thorny stems and poisonous alkaloids they defend themselves. They store
their strength in corms, taproots, bulbs. In blazing desert reaches their
leaves grow narrow as needles, as if squinting against the glare; in forests,
they lay out their broad leaves with an intricate care to catch every ray
of the light. They are life as we know it today, ingenious, indomitable,
all a struggle for a place in the sun.

Now plants had entered into intense competition with Homo sapiens,
a creature determined to clear his lands for a few species like wheat and
barley, rice and maize. Those plants that did not enter his good graces
fought him as weeds, or betook themselves to bogs and moors, strands and
alpine meadows where he would not molest them. So we have not only
nettles and cockles and tares, but the flora of the herbalists, of Grimm's
fairy-tales, of the Scotch heather and the Irish bogs, of the plain of
Marathon, with poet's narcissus blooming from the blood of heroes.
This is the rich plant civilization that gives us scarlet anemones of
Provence, the alpine blossoms that the poet-botanist Haller gathered, and
wide-eyed arctic wildflowers named by Linnaeus upon his Lapland
faring.

It has inherited the earth, this Great Northern Flora, like man himself.
And it has followed him wherever he has gone, wherever, with his
plough and axe, his petted cereals and his close-cropping cattle, he comes
to lord it over native peoples and native vegetations unequipped to repel
him. English sheep brought English burs in their wool to New Zealand.
At man's heels Russian thistle invaded North America like a Tartar host,
spreading from west to east on the wind of conquest; man settled our

376 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

western cactus in Australia, and there it has become a bristling horde
harrying all that grows in its way.

So a sinless world altered, and with gardens came the weeds in them.
What is a weed ? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For
me, a weed is a plant out of place. Or, less tolerantly, call it a foreign
aggressor, which is a thing not so mild as a mere escape from cultivation,
a visitor that sows itself innocently in a garden bed where you would
not choose to plant it. Most weeds have natal countries, whence they have
sortied. So Japanese honeysuckle, English plantain, Russian thistle came
from lands we recognize, but others, like gypsies, have lost all record of
fheir geographic origin. Some of them turn up in all countries, and are
listed in no flora as natives. Some knock about the seaports of the world,
springing up wherever ballast used to be dumped from the old sailing
ships. Others prefer cities; they have lost contact with sweet soil, and lead
a guttersnipe existence. A little group occurs only where wool waste is
dumped, others are dooryard and pavement weeds, seeming to thrive
the more as they are trod by the feet of man's generations. Some prized
in an age of simpler tastes have become garden declasses and street urchins ;
thus it comes about that the pleasant but plebeian scent of Bouncing Bet,
that somewhat blowsy pink of old English gardens, is now one of the
characteristic odors of American sidewalk ends, where the pavement
peters out and the shacks and junked cars begin. . . .

As long as man keeps the upper hand with Nature, he is going to
strive to bring about a flora once more cosmopolitan. His commerce and
exchange of crops and weeds, of garden materials and attendant pests,
will break down insularity and provincialism just as technical civilization
drives out local customs and costumes, and smooths away dialects in
favor of a uniform speech. Like the rest of our future, this promises
mixed blessings. On the Mojave it is grateful to rest under the shade of
tamarix trees brought in from the Sahara, giving respite where even the
native mesquite will not cast its thin umbrage. Upon the prairie, where
once the virgin sod was proud with tall native grasses and blazing com-
posites, it is lamentable to feel the foreign weeds crowd harsh about the
ankles. To the coming of such changes there is no simple answer.

But there are dreams, there are plans. Already with plant breeding and
hybridization man has accomplished miracles beyond Nature's own power.
Greater things could yet be done, in afforestation of the tree-starved lands,
in cereals that would be clean, once more, of the rusts and smuts that
civilization has broadcasted. . . .

But sufficient to our own long day is this modern flora of ours. If I have
left no simple impression of what it is like, then I have left the correct

FLOWERING EARTH 377

impression. There are some hundred thousand species of flowering plants
on earth today, and they are scattered through some two hundred and
fifty families. Add to these all the mosses and ferns, the Gymnosperms and
fungi, seaweeds and algas, and you have some three hundred thousand
races of plant life populating the Green Kingdom. All this, out of the first
bacteria that colonized the planet. All this brilliant land flora, after naked
Psylophyton tentatively trying the new environment of the old Devonian
continent.

Never in past geologic time can there have been so complex a vegetation
as today, for never were there so many climates, such mountains, such
deserts, such seas, such arctics, such island archipelagoes, such insularity
everywhere. You could have written a florula of Cambrian times upon a
very few pages. Today there breathes no man who can master more than
a little portion of the plant world, or a selected group of families. Sir
Joseph Dalton Hooker, in his prime, could recognize on sight ten thousand
species, because he had collected and identified everywhere, from the
Indian jungles to lonely Kerguelen Island in the Pacific, and he knew
the diatomaceous flora of the arctic ocean as well as the sweet rustic wild-
flowers of England. After the age of ninety his prodigious memory fell off
a bit. But he was one of the rare titans of classification, like Linnaeus and
De Candolle. A fair-to-middling student is glad to recognize on sight two
thousand kinds of plants, and he easily goes rusty without constant
practice. I remember best, I find, not the plants I learned most recently,
but, like poetry, those I memorized when the tablets of my brain were
fresh. It follows therefore that I recall still, with a morning clarity, the
inhabitants of my distant glen, those old Tertiary Appalachian aristocrats
blooming where no weed ever sets root, where there is neither the gaudy
splendor of these California poppies, nor the urban squalor of quitch grass
and pigweed and goosefoot. The last plant I shall forget, surely, will be
the first I ever taught myself to know — the windflower of those Blue Ridge
Woods.

A Lobster; or, The Study of Zoology

T. H. HUXLEY

From Discourses Biological and Zoological

(OERTAIN BROAD LAWS HAVE A GENERAL APPLICATION
^— ' throughout both the animal and the vegetable worlds, but the ground
common to these kingdoms of nature is not of very wide extent, and
the multiplicity of details is so great, that the student of living beings
finds himself obliged to devote his attention exclusively either to the one
or the other. If he elects to study plants, under any aspect ... his science
is botany. But if the investigation of animal life be his choice, the name
generally applied to him will vary according to the kind of animals he
studies, or the particular phenomena of animal life to which he confines
his attention. If the study of man is his object, he is called an anatomist,
or a physiologist, or an ethnologist; but if he dissects animals, or ex-
amines into the mode in which their functions are performed, he is a
comparative anatomist or comparative physiologist. If he turns his atten-
tion to fossil animals, he is a palaeontologist. If his mind is more partic-
ularly directed to the specific description, discrimination, classification,
and distribution of animals, he is termed a zoologist.

For the purpose of the present discourse, however, I shall recognise none
of these titles save the last, which I shall employ as the equivalent of
botanist, and I shall use the term zoology as denoting the whole doctrine
of animal life, in contradistinction to botany, which signifies the whole
doctrine of vegetable life.

Employed in this sense, zoology, like botany, is divisible into three great
but subordinate sciences, morphology, physiology, and distribution, each
of which may, to a very great extent, be studied independently of the
other.

Zoological morphology is the doctrine of animal form or structure.
Anatomy is one of its branches; development is another; while classifica-

378

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY 379

tion is the expression of the relations which different animals bear to one
another, in respect of their anatomy and their development.

Zoological distribution is the study of animals in relation to the ter-
restrial conditions which obtain now, or have obtained at any previous
epoch of the earth's history.

Zoological physiology, lastly, is the doctrine of the functions or actions
of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled by certain
forces, and performing an amount of work which can be expressed in
terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is
to deduce the facts of morphology, on the one hand, and those of distribu-
tion on the other, from the laws of the molecular forces of matter.

Such is the scope of zoology. But if I were to content myself with the
enunciation of these dry definitions, I shall ill exemplify that method of
teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-
night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let
us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better,
and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic
to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all these branches
of zoological science.

I have before me a lobster. When I examine it, what appears to be the
most striking charactej it presents? Why, I observe that this part which
we call the tail of the lobster, is made up of six distinct hard rings and a
seventh terminal piece. If I separate one of the middle rings, say the third,
I find it carries upon its under surface a pair of limbs or appendages, each
of which consists of a stalk and two terminal pieces.

If I now take the fourth ring, I find it has the same structure, and so
have the fifth and the second; so that, in each of these divisions of the
tail, I find parts which correspond with one another, a ring and two
appendages; and in each appendage a stalk and two end pieces. These
corresponding parts are called, in the technical language of anatomy,
"homologous parts." The ring of the third division is the "homologue" of
the ring of the fifth, the appendage of the former is the homologue of the
appendage of the latter. And, as each division exhibits corresponding parts
in corresponding places, we say that all the divisions are constructed upon
the same plan. But now let us consider the sixth division. It is similar to,
and yet different from, the others. The ring is essentially the same as in
the other divisions; but the appendages look at first as if they were very
different; and yet when we regard them closely, what do we find? A stalk
and two terminal divisions, exactly as in the others, but the stalk is very
short and very thick, the terminal divisions are very broad and flat, and
one of them is divided into two pieces.

380 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

I may say, therefore, that the sixth segment is like the others in plan,
but that it is modified in its detail.

The first segment is like the others, so far as its ring is concerned, and
though its appendages differ from any of those yet examined in the sim-
plicity of their structure, parts corresponding with the stem and one of
the divisions of the appendages of the other segments can be readily dis-
cerned in them.

Thus it appears that the lobster's tail is composed of a series of seg-
ments which are fundamentally similar, though each presents peculiar
modifications of the plan common to all. But when I turn to the forepart
of the body I see, at first, nothing but a great shield-like shell, called
technically the "carapace," ending in front in a sharp spine on either side
of which are the curious compound eyes, set upon the ends of stout mov-
able stalks. Behind these, on the under side of the body, are two pairs of
long feelers, or antennae, followed by six pairs of jaws folded against one
another over the mouth, and five pairs of legs, the foremost of these being
the great pinchers, or claws, of the lobster.

It looks, at first, a little hopeless to attempt to find in this complex mass
a series of rings, each with its pair of appendages, such as I have shown
you in the abdomen, and yet it is not difficult to demonstrate their exist-
ence. Strip off the legs, and you will find that each pair is attached to a
very definite segment of the under wall of the body; but these segments,
instead of being the lower parts of free rings, as in the tail, are such parts
of rings which are all solidly united and bound together; and the like is
true of the jaws, the feelers, and the eye-stalks, every pair of which is
borne upon its own special segment. Thus the conclusion is gradually
forced upon us, that the body of the lobster is composed of as many rings
as there are pairs of appendages, namely, twenty in all, but that the six
hindmost rings remain free and movable, while the fourteen front rings
become firmly soldered together, their backs forming one continuous
shield — the carapace.

Unity of plan, diversity in execution, is the lesson taught by the study
of the rings of the body, and the same instruction is given still more em-
phatically by the appendages. If I examine the outermost jaw I find it con-
sists of three distinct portions, an inner, a middle, and an outer, mounted
upon a common stem; and if I compare this jaw with the legs behind it,
jor the jaws in front of it, I find it quite easy to see, that, in the legs, it is
the part of the appendage which corresponds with the inner division,
which becomes modified into what we know familiarly as the "leg," while
the middle division disappears, and the outer division is hidden under
the carapace. Nor is it more difficult to discern that, in the appendages of

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY 381

the tail, the middle division appears again and the outer vanishes; while,
on the other hand, in the foremost jaw, the so-called mandible, the inner
division only is left; and, in the same way, the parts of the feelers and of
the eye-stalks can be identified with those of the legs and jaws.

But whither does all this tend ? To the very remarkable conclusion that
a unity of plan, of the same kind as that discoverable in the tail or ab-
domen of the lobster, pervades the whole organisation of its skeleton, so
that I can return to the diagram representing any one of the rings of the
tail and by adding a third division to each appendage, I can use it as a
sort of scheme or plan of any ring of the body. I can give names to all the
parts of that figure, and then if I take any segment of the body of the
lobster, I can point out to you exactly, what modification the general plan
has undergone in that particular segment; what part has remained mov-
able, and what has become fixed to another; what has been excessively
developed and metamorphosed and what has been suppressed.

But I imagine I hear the question, How is all this to be tested ? No doubt
it is a pretty and ingenious way of looking at the structure of any ani-
mal; but is it anything more? Does Nature acknowledge, in any deeper
way, this unity of plan we seem to trace? . . .

Happily, however, there is a criterion of morphological truth, and a sure
test of all homologies. Our lobster has not always been what we see it; it
was once an egg, a semifluid mass of yolk, not so big as a pin's head, con-
tained in a transparent membrane, and exhibiting not the least trace of
any one of those organs, the multiplicity and complexity of which, in the
adult, are so surprising. After a time, a delicate patch of cellular mem-
brane appeared upon one face of this yolk, and that patch was the founda-
tion of the whole creature, the clay out of which it would be moulded.
Gradually investing the yolk, it became subdivided by transverse con-
strictions into segments, the forerunners of the rings of the body. Upon
the ventral surface of each of the rings thus sketched out, a pair of bud-
like prominences made their appearance — the rudiments of the appen-
dages of the ring. At first, all the appendages were alike, but, as they
grew, most of them became distinguished into a stem and two terminal
divisions, to which, in the middle part of the body, was added a third
outer division; and it was only at a later period, that by the modification,
or absorption, of certain of these primitive constituents, the limbs acquired
their perfect form.

Thus the study of development proves that the doctrine of unity of plan
is not merely a fancy, that it is not merely one way of looking at the mat-
ter, but that it is the expression of deep-seated natural facts. The legs and
jaws of the lobster may not merely be regarded as modifications of a com-

382 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

mon type, — in fact and in nature they are so, — the leg and the jaw of the
young animal being, at first, indistinguishable.

These are wonderful truths, the more so because the zoologist finds
them to be of universal application. The investigation of a polype, of a
snail, of a fish, of a horse, or of a man, would have led us, though by a
less easy path, perhaps, to exactly the same point. Unity of plan every-
where lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure — the complex
is everywhere evolved out of the simple. Every animal has at first the
form of an egg, and every animal and every organic part, in reaching its
adult state, passes through conditions common to other animals and other
adult parts; and this leads me to another point. I have hitherto spoken as if
the lobster were alone in the world, but, as I need hardly remind you,
there are myriads of other animal organisms. Of these, some, such as men,
horses, birds, fishes, snails, slugs, oysters, corals, and sponges, are not in the
least like the lobster. But other animals, though they may differ a good
deal from the lobster, are yet either very like it, or are like something
that is like it. The cray fish, the rock lobster, and the prawn, and the
shrimp, for example, however different, are yet so like lobsters, that a
child would group them as of the lobster kind, in contradistinction to
snails and slugs; and these last again would form a kind by themselves, in
contradistinction to cows, horses, and sheep, the cattle kind.

But this spontaneous grouping into "kinds" is the first essay of the
human mind at classification, or the calling by a common name of those
things that are alike, and the arranging them in such a manner as best to
suggest the sum of their likenesses and unlikenesses to other things.

Those kinds which include no other subdivisions than the sexes, or
various breeds, are called, in technical language, species. The English lob-
ster is a species, our cray fish is another, our prawn is another. In other
countries, however, there are lobsters, cray fish, and prawns, very like ours,
and yet presenting sufficient differences to deserve distinction. Naturalists,
therefore, express this resemblance and this diversity by grouping them
as distinct species of the same "genus." But the lobster and the cray fish,
though belonging to distinct genera, have many features in common, and
hence are grouped together in an assemblage which is called a family.
More distant resemblances connect the lobster with the prawn and the
crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again,
more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with
the woodlouse, the king crab, the water flea, and the barnacle, and sep-
arate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the
larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar
features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, so that these are

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY 383

grouped into the still larger assemblage or "province" Articulata\ and,
finally, the relations which these have to worms and other lower animals,
are expressed by combining the whole vast aggregate into the sub-king-
dom of Annulosa.

If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should
have found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other ani-
mals into the sub-kingdom Protozoa; if I had selected a fresh-water polype
or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom Ccelen-
terata, would have grouped themselves around my type; had a snail been
chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and water, shells,
the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have gradually linked
themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of Mollusc a\ and
finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first,
the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird,
the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the same sub-kingdom
of Vertebrata.

And if I had followed out all these various lines of classification fully,
I should discover in the end that there was no animal* either recent or fos-
sil, which did not at once fall into one or other of these sub-kingdoms. In
other words, every animal is organised upon one or other of the five, or
more, plans, the existence of which renders our classification possible. And
so definitely and precisely marked is the structure of each animal, that,
in the present state of our knowledge, there is not the least evidence to
prove that a form, in the slightest degree transitional between any of the
two groups Vertcbrata, Annulosa, Mollusca, and Coelenterata, either ex-
ists, or has existed, during that period of the earth's history which is
recorded by the geologist. Nevertheless, you must not for a moment sup-
pose, because no such transitional forms are known, that the members of
the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another.
On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all similar, and the
primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a
polype are, in no essential structural respects, distinguishable. . . .

Turning from these purely morphological considerations, let us now
examine into the manner in which the attentive study of the lobster impels
us into other lines of research.

Lobsters are found in all the European seas; but on the opposite shores
of the Atlantic and in the seas of the southern hemisphere they do not
exist. They are, however, represented in these regions by very closely
allied, but distinct forms — the Homarus Americanus and the Homarus
Capensis: so that we may say that the European has one species of Ho-

384 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

marus\ the American, another; the African, another; and thus the remark-
able facts of geographical distribution begin to dawn upon us.

Again, if we examine the contents of the earth's crust, we shall find in
the latter of those deposits, which have served as the great burying grounds
of past ages, numberless lobster-like animals, but none so similar to our
living lobster as to make zoologists sure that they belonged even to the
same genus. If we go still further back in time, we discover, in the oldest
rocks of all, the remains of animals, constructed on the same general plan
as the lobster, and belonging to the same great group of Crustacea^ but
for the most part totally different from the lobster, and indeed from any
other living form of crustacean; and thus we gain a notion of that suc-
cessive change of the animal population of the globe, in past ages, which
is the most striking fact revealed by geology.

Consider, now, where our inquiries have led us. We studied our type
morphologically, when we determined its atonomy and its development,
and when comparing it, in these respects, with other animals, we made
out its place in a system of classification. If we were to examine every ani-
mal in a similar manner, we should establish a complete body of zoolog-
ical morphology. . . .

But you will observe one remarkable circumstance, that, up to this point,
the question of the life of these organisms has not come under considera-
tion. Morphology and distribution might be studied almost as well, if ani-
mals and plants were a peculiar kind of crystals, and possessed none of
those functions which distinguish living beings so remarkably. But the
facts of morphology and distribution have to be accounted for, and the
science, the aim of which it is to account for them, is Physiology.

Let us return to our lobster once more. If we watched the creature in
its native element, we should see it climbing actively the submerged rocks,
among which it delights to live, by means of its strong legs; or swimming
by powerful strokes of its great tail, the appendages of the sixth joint of
which are spread out into a broad fan-like propeller: seize it, and it will
show you that its great claws are no mean weapons of offence; suspend a
piece of carrion among its haunts, and it will greedily devour it, tearing
and crushing the flesh by means of its multitudinous jaws.

Suppose that we had known nothing of the lobster but as an inert mass,
an organic crystal, if I may use the phrase, and that we could suddenly
see it exerting all these powers, what wonderful new ideas and new ques-
tions would arise in our minds! The great new question would be, "How
does all this take place?" the chief new idea would be, the idea of adapta-
tion to purpose, — the notion, that the constituents of animal bodies are not
mere unconnected parts, but organs working together to an end. Let us

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY 385

consider the tail of the lobster again from this point of view. Morphology
has taught us that it is a series of segments composed of homologous parts,
which undergo various modifications — beneath and through which a
common plan of formation is discernible. But if I look at the same part
physiologically, I see that it is a most beautifully constructed organ of
locomotion, by means of which the animal can swiftly propel itself either
backwards or forwards.

But how is his remarkable propulsive machine made to perform its func-
tions? If I were suddenly to kill one of these animals and to take out all
the soft parts, I should find the shell to be perfectly inert, to have no more
power of moving itself than is possessed by the machinery of a mill when
disconnected from its steam-engine or water-wheel. But if I were to open
it, and take out the viscera only, leaving the white flesh, I should perceive
that the lobster could bend and extend its tail as well as before. If I were
to cut off the tail, I should cease to find any spontaneous motion in it; but
on pinching any portion of the flesh, I should observe that it underwent a
very curious change — each fibre becoming shorter and thicker. By this
act of contraction, as it is termed, the parts to which the ends of the fibre
are attached are, of course, approximated; and according to the relations
of their points of attachment to the centres of motions of the different
rings, the bending or the extension of the tail results. Close observation
of the newly-opened lobster would soon show that all its movements are
due to the same cause — the shortening and thickening of these fleshy
fibres, which are technically called muscles.

Here, then, is a capital fact. The movements of the lobster are due to
muscular contractility. But why does a muscle contract at one time and
not at another? Why does one whole group of muscles contract when the
lobster wishes to extend his tail, and another group when he desires to
bend it? What is it originates, directs, and controls die motive power?

Experiment, the great instrument for the ascertainment of truth in
physical science, answers this question for us. In the head of the lobster
there lies a small mass of that peculiar tissue which is known as nervous
substance. Cords of similar matter connect this brain of the lobster, di-
rectly or indirectly, with the muscles. Now, if these communicating cords
are cut, the brain remaining entire, the power of exerting what we call
voluntary motion in the parts below the section is destroyed; and, on the
other hand, if, the cords remaining entire, the brain mass be destroyed,
the same voluntary mobility is equally lost. Whence the inevitable con-
clusion is, that the power of originating these motions resides in the brain
and is propagated along the nervous cords.

In the higher animals the phenomena which attend this transmission

386 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

have been investigated, and the exertion of the peculiar energy which re-
sides in the nerves has been found to be accompanied by a disturbance of
the electrical st^te of their molecules.

If we could exactly estimate the signification of this disturbance; if we
could obtain the value of a given exertion of nerve force by determining
the quantity of electricity; or of heat, of which it is the equivalent; if we
could ascertain upon what arrangement, or other condition of the mole-
cules of matter, the manifestation of the nervous and muscular energies
depends (and doubtless science will some day or other ascertain these
points), physiologists would have attained their ultimate goal in this direc-
tion; they would have determined the relation of the motive force of ani-
mals to the other forms of force found in nature; and if the same process
had been successfully performed for all the operations which are carried
on in, and by, the animal frame, physiology would be perfect, and the
facts of morphology and distribution would be deducible from the laws
which physiologists had established, combined with those determining the
condition of the surrounding universe.

There is not a fragment of the organism of this humble animal whose
study would not lead us into regions of thought as large as those which I
have briefly opened up to you; but what I have been saying, I trust, has
not only enabled you to form a conception of the scope and purport of
zoology, but has given you an imperfect example of the manner in which,
in my opinion, that science, or indeed any physical science, may be best
taught. . . .

And if it were my business to fit you for the certificate in zoological sci-
ence granted by this department, I should pursue a course precisely sim-
ilar in principle to that which I have taken to-night. I should select a fresh-
water sponge, a fresh- water polype or a Cyancea, a fresh-water mussel, a
lobster, a fowl, as types of the five primary divisions of the animal king-
dom. I should explain their structure very fully, and show how each
illustrated the great principles of zoology.

The Life of the Simplest Animals

DAVID STARR JORDAN AND
VERNON LYMAN KELLOGG

From Animal Life

HE SIMPLEST ANIMALS, OR PROTOZOA.— "THE SIMPLEST
animals are those whose bodies are simplest in structure and which
do the things done by all living animals, such as eating, breathing, mov-
ing, feeling, and reproducing in the most primitive way. The body of a
horse, made up of various organs and tissues, is complexly formed, and
the various organs of the body perform the various kinds of work for
which they are fitted in a complex way. The simplest animals are all
very small, and almost all live in the water; some kinds in fresh water
and many kinds in the ocean. Some live in damp sand or moss, and still
others are parasites in the bodies of other animals. They are not familiarly
known to us; we can not see them with the unaided eye, and yet there
are thousands of different kinds of them, and they may be found wher-
ever there is water.

In a glass of water taken from a stagnant pool there is a host of animals.
There may be a few water beetles or water bugs swimming violently
about, animals half an inch long, with head and eyes and oar-like legs;
or there may be a little fish, or some tadpoles and wrigglers. These are
evidently not the simplest animals. There will be many very small active
animals barely visible to the unaided eyes. These, too, are animals of
considerable complexity. But if a single drop of the water be placed
on a glass slip or in a watch glass and examined with a compound micro-
scope, there will be seen a number of extremely small creatures which
swim about in the water-drop by means of fine hairs, or crawl slowly
on the surface of the glass. These are among our simplest animals. There
are, as already said, many kinds of these "simplest animals," although,
perhaps strictly speaking, only one kind can be called simplest. Some of
these kinds are spherical in shape, some elliptical or football-shaped, some

388 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

conical, some flattened. Some have many fine, minute hairs projecting
from the surface; some have a few longer, stronger hairs that lash back
and forth in the water, and some have no hairs at all. There are many
kinds and they differ in size, shape, body covering, manner of move-
ment, and habit of food-getting. And some are truly simpler than others.
But all agree in one thing — which is a very important thing — and that
is in being composed in the simplest way possible among animals.

The animal cell. — The whole body of any one of the simplest animals
or Protozoa is composed for the animal's whole lifetime of but a single
cell. The bodies of all other animals are composed of many cells. The
cell may be called the unit of animal (or plant) structure. The body
of a horse is complexly composed of organs and tissues. Each of these
organs and tissues is in turn composed of a large number of these
structural units called cells. These cells are of great variety in shape and
size and general character. The cells which compose muscular tissue are
very different from the cells which compose the brain. And both of these
kinds of cells are very different from the simple primitive undifferentiated
kind of cell seen in the body of a protozoan, or in the earliest embryonic
stages of a many-celled animal.

The animal cell is rarely typically cellular in character — that is, it is
rarely in the condition of a tiny sac or box of symmetrical shape. Plant
cells are often of this character. The primitive animal cell consists of a
small mass of a viscid, nearly colorless, substance called protoplasm. This
protoplasm is differentiated to form two parts or regions of the cell, an
inner denser mass called the nucleus, and an outer, clearer, inclosing
mass called the cytoplasm. . . .

What the primitive cell can do. — The body of one of the minute
animals in the water-drop is a single cell. The body is not composed of
organs of different parts, as in the body of the horse. There is no heart,
no stomach; there are no muscles, no nerves. And yet the protozoan is a
living animal as truly as is the horse, and it breathes and eats and moves
and feels and produces young as truly as does the horse. It performs alJ
the processes necessary for the life of an animal. The single cell, the
single minute speck of protoplasm, has the power of doing, in a very
simple and primitive way, all those things which are necessary for life,
and which are done in the case of other animals by the various organs
of the body.

Amoeba. — The simple and primitive life of these Protozoa can be best
understood by the observation of living individuals. In the slime and
sediment at the bottom of stagnant pools lives a certain specially interest-
ing kind of protozoan, the Amoeba. Of all the simplest animals this is as

THE LIFE OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS 389

simple or primitive as any. The minute viscous particle of protoplasm
which forms its body is irregular in outline, and its outline or shape
slowly but constantly changes. It may contract into a tiny ball; it may
become almost star-shaped; it may become elongate or flattened; short,
blunt, finger-like projections called pseudopods extend from the central
body mass, and these projections are constantly changing, slowly pushing
out or drawing in. The single protoplasmic cell which makes up the
body of the Amoeba has no fixed outline; it is a cell without a wall. The
substance of the cell or body is protoplasm, semiliquid and colorless.
The changes in form of the body are the moving of the Amoeba. By
close watching it may be seen that the Amoeba changes its position on
the glass slip. Although provided with no legs or wings or scales or
hooks — that is, with no special organs of locomotion — the Amoeba moves.
There are no muscles in this tiny body; muscles are composed of many
contractile cells massed together, and the Amoeba is but one cell. But it
is a contractile cell; it can do what the muscles of the complex animals do.

If one of the finger-like projections of the Amoeba, or, indeed, if any
part of its body comes in contact with some other microscopic animal or
plant or some small fragment of a larger form, the soft body of the
Amoeba will be seen to press against it, and soon the plant or animal
or organic particle becomes sunken in the protoplasm of the formless
body and entirely inclosed in it. The absorbed particle soon wholly or
partly disappears. This is the manner in which the Amoeba eats. It has
no mouth or stomach. Any part of its body mass can take in and digest
food. The viscous, membraneless body simply flows about the food and
absorbs it. Such of the food particles as can not be digested are thrust
out of the body.

The Amoeba breathes. Though we can not readily observe this act of
respiration, it is true that the Amoeba takes into its body through any
part of its surface oxygen from the air which is mixed with water, and
it gives off from any part of its body carbonic-acid gas. Although the
Amoeba has no lungs or gills or other special organs of respiration, it
breathes in oxygen and gives out carbonic-acid gas, which is just what
the horse does with its elaborately developed organs of respiration.

If the Amoeba, in moving slowly about, comes into contact with a
sand grain or other foreign particle not suitable for food, the soft body
slowly recoils and flows — for the movement is really a flowing of the
thickly fluid protoplasm — so as to leave the sand grain at one side. The
Amoeba feels. It shows the effects of stimulation. Its movements can be
changed, stopped, or induced by mechanical or chemical stimuli or by

390 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

changes in temperature. The Amoeba is irritable; it possesses irritability,
which is sensation in its simplest degree.

If food is abundant the Amoeba soon increases in size. The bulk of its
body is bound to increase if new substance is constantly assimilated and
added to it. The Amoeba grows. But there seem to be some fixed limits
to the extent of this increase in size. No Amoeba becomes large. A
remarkable phenomenon always occurs to prevent this. An Amoeba
which has grown for some time contracts all its finger-like processes, and
its body becomes constricted. This constriction or fissure increases inward,
so that the body is soon divided fairly in two. The body, being an animal
cell, possesses a nucleus imbedded in the body protoplasm or cytoplasm.
When the body begins to divide, the nucleus begins to divide also, and
becomes entirely divided before the fission of the cytoplasm is complete.
There are now two Amoeba, each half the size of the original one; each,
indeed, being actually one half of the original one. This splitting of the
body of the Amoeba, which is called fission, is the process of reproduc-
tion. The original Amoeba is the parent; the two halves of the parent
are the young. Each of the young possesses all of the characteristics
and powers of the parent; each can move, eat, feel, grow, and reproduce
by fission. It is very evident that this is so, for any part of the body or
the whole body was used in performing these functions, and the young
are simply two parts of the parent's body. But if there be any doubt
about the matter, observation of the behavior of the young or new
Amoebce will soon remove it. Each puts out pseudopods, moves, ingests
food particles, avoids sand grains, contracts if the water is heated, grows,
and finally divides in two.

Paramoecium. — Another protozoan which is common in stagnant pools
and can be readily obtained and observed is Paramoecium. The body of
the Paramoecium is much larger than that of the Amoeba, being nearly
one fourth of a millimeter in length, and is of fixed shape. It is elon-
gate, elliptical, and flattened, and when examined under the microscope
seems to be a very complexly formed little mass. The body of the
Paramoecium is indeed less primitive than that of the Amoeba, and yet it
is still but a single cell. The protoplasm of the body is very soft within
and dense on the outside, and it is covered externally by a thin mem-
brane. The body is covered with short fine hairs or cilia, which are fine
processes of the dense protoplasm of the surface. There is on one side
an oblique shallow groove that leads to a small, funnel-shaped depression
in the body which serves as a primitive sort of mouth or opening for the
ingress of food. The Paramoecium swims about in the water by vibrating
the cilia which cover the body, and brings food to the mouth opening by

THE LIFE OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS 391

producing tiny currents in the water by means of the cilia in the oblique
groove. The food, which consists of other living Protozoa, is taken into
the body mass only through the funnel-shaped opening, and that part
of it which is undigested is thrust out always through a particular part
of the body surface. (The taking in and ejecting of foreign particles can
be seen by putting a little powdered carmine in the water.) Within the
body there are two nuclei and two so-called pulsating vacuoles. These
pulsating vacuoles (Amoeba has one) seem to aid in discharging waste
products from the body. When the Paramoecium touches some foreign
substance or is otherwise irritated it swims away, and it shoots out from
the surface of its body some fine long threads which when at rest are
probably coiled up in little sacs on the surface of the body. When the
Paramoecium has taken in enough food and grown so that it has reached
the limit of its size, it divides transversely into halves as the Amoeba
does. Both nuclei divide first, and then the cytoplasm constricts and
divides. Thus two new Paramoecia are formed. One of them has to
develop a new mouth opening and groove, so that there is in the case
of the reproduction of Paramoecium the beginnings of developmental
changes during the course of the growth of the young. The young
Amoebce havp only to add substance to their bodies, to grow larger, in
order to be exactly like their parent.

The new Paramoecia attain full size and then divide, each into two.
And so on for many generations. But it has been discovered that this
simplest kind of reproduction can not go on indefinitely. After a number
of generations the Paramoecia^ instead of simply dividing in two, come
together in pairs, and a part of one of the nuclei of each member of a
pair passes into the body of and fuses with a part of one of the nuclei
of the other member of the pair. In the meantime the second nucleus
in each Paramoecium has broken up into small pieces and disappeared.
The new nucleus composed of parts of the nuclei from two animals
divides, giving each animal two nuclei just as it had before this extraor-
dinary process, which is called conjugation, began. Each Paramoecium,
with its nuclei composed of parts of the nuclei from two distinct indi-
viduals, now simply divides in two, and a large number of generations
by simple fission follow.

Paramoecium in the character of its body and in the manner of the
performance of its life processes is distinctly less simple than the Amoeba,
but its body is composed of a single structural unit, a single cell, and it
is truly one of the "simplest animals." . . .

Marine Protozoa. — If called upon to name the characteristic animals of
the ocean, we answer readily with the names of the better-known ocean

392 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

fishes, like the herring and cod, which we know to live there in enormous
numbers; the seals and sea lions, the whales and porpoises, those fish-like
animals which are really more like land animals than like the true
fishes; and the jelly-fishes and corals and star-fishes which abound along
the ocean's edge. But in naming only these we should be omitting certain
animals which in point of abundance of individuals vastly outnumber all
other animals, and which in point of importance in helping maintain the
complex and varied life of the ocean distinctly outclass all other marine
forms. These animals are the marine Protozoa, those of the "simplest
animals" which live in the ocean.

Although the water at the surface of the ocean appears clear, and on
superficial examination devoid of life, yet a drop of this water taken from
certain ocean regions examined under the microscope reveals the fact
that this water is inhabited by Protozoa. Not only is the water at the
very surface of the ocean the home of the simplest animals, but they can
be found in all the water from the surface to a great depth beneath it.
In a pint of this ocean water from the surface or near it there may be
millions of these animals. In the oceans of the world the number of them
is inconceivable. Dr. W. K. Brooks says that the "basis of all the life in
the modern ocean is found in the micro-organisms of the surface." By
micro-organisms he means the one-celled animals and the one-celled
plants. For the simplest plants are, like the simplest animals, one-celled.
"Modern microscopical research," he says, "has shown that these simple
plants, and the Globigerinae and Radiolaria [kinds of Protozoa] which
feed upon them, are so abundant and prolific that they meet all demands
and supply the food for all the animals of the ocean."

The Globigerince and Radiolaria. — The Globigerinae and Radiolaria
are among the most interesting of all the simplest animals. Their simple
one-celled body is surrounded by a microscopic shell, which among the
Globigerinae is usually made of lime (calcium carbonate), in the case of
Radiolaria of silica. These minute shells present a great variety of shape
and pattern, many being of the most exquisite symmetry and beauty.
The shells are usually perforated by many small holes, through which
project long, delicate, protoplasmic threads. These fine threads interlace
when they touch each other, thus forming a sort of protoplasmic network
outside of the shell. . . .

Most of the myriads of the simplest animals which swarm in the sur-
face waters of the ocean belong to a few kinds of these shell-bearing
Globigerinae and Radiolaria. Large areas of the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean are covered with a slimy gray mud, often of great thickness,
which is called globigerina-ooze, because it is made up chiefly of the

THE LIFE OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS 393

microscopic shells of Globigerinae. As death comes to the minute protcv,
plasmic animals their hard shells sink slowly to the bottom, and accumu-
late in such vast quantities as to form a thick layer on the ocean floor*
Nor is it only in present times and in the oceans we know that the
Globigerinae have flourished. All over the world there are thick rock
strata which are composed chiefly of the fossilized shells of these simplest
animals. Where the strata are made up exclusively of these shells the
rock is chalk. Thus are composed the great chalk cliffs of Kent, which
gave to England the early name of Albion, and the chalk beds of France
and Spain and Greece. The existence of these chalk strata means that
where now is land, in earlier geologic times were oceans, and that in the
oceans Globigerinae lived in countless numbers. Dying, their shells accumu-
lated to form thick layers on the sea bottom. In later geologic ages this sea
bottom has been uplifted and is now land, far perhaps from, any ocean.
The chalk strata of the plains of the United States, like those in Kansas,
are more than a thousand miles from the sea, and yet they are mainly
composed of the fossilized shells of marine Protozoa. Indeed, we are
acquainted with more than twice as many fossil species of Globigerinae
as species living at the present time. The ancestors of these Globigerinae,
from which the present Globigerinae differ but little, can be traced far
back in the geologic history of the world. It is an ancient type of animal
structure.

The Radiolaria, too, which live abundantly in the present oceans,
especially in the marine waters of the tropical and temperate zones, are
found as fossils in the rocks from the time of the coal age on. The
siliceous shells of the Radiolaria sinking to the sea bottom and accumulat-
ing there in great masses form a radiolaria-ooze similar to the globiger-
inae-ooze; and just as with the Globigerinae, the remains of the ancient
Radiolaria formed thick layers on the floor of the ancient oceans, which
have since been uplifted and now form certain rock strata. That kind of
rock called Tripoli, found in Sicily, and the Barbados earth from the
island of Barbados, both of which are used as polishing powder, are
composed almost exclusively of the siliceous shells of ancient and long-
extinct Radiolaria. . . .

The primitive but successful life. — Living consists of the performing
of certain so-called life processes, such as eating, breathing, feeling, and
multiplying. These processes are performed among the higher animals
by various organs, special parts of the body, each of which is fitted to
do some one kind of work, to perform some one of these processes.
There is a division or assignment of labor here among different parts
of the body. Such a division of labor, and special fitting of different parts

394 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

of the body for special kinds of work does not exist, or exists only in
slightest degree among the simplest animals. The Amoeba eats or feels
or moves with any part of its body; all of the body exposed to the air
(air held in the water) breathes; the whole body mass takes part in the
process of reproduction.

Only very small organisms can live in this simplest way. So all of the
Protozoa are minute. When the only part of the body which can absorb
oxygen is the simple external surface of a spherical body, the mass of
that body must be very small. With any increase in size of the animal
the mass of the body increases as the cube of the diameter, while the
surface increases only as the square of the diameter. Therefore the part
of the body (inside) which requires to be provided with oxygen increases
more rapidly than the part (the outside) which absorbs oxygen. Thus
this need of oxygen alone is sufficient to determine the limit of size which
can be attained by the spherical or subspherical Protozoa.

That the simplest animals, despite the lack of organs and the primitive
way of performing the life processes, live successfully is evident from
their existence in such extraordinary numbers. They outnumber all other
animals. Although serving as food for hosts of ocean animals, the marine
Protozoa are the most abundant in individuals of all living animals. The
conditions of life in the surface waters of the ocean are easy, and a
simple structure and simple method of performance of the life processes
are wholly adequate for successful life under these conditions. That the
character of the body structure of the Protozoa has changed but little
since early geologic times is explained by the even, unchanging character
of their surroundings. The oceans of former ages have undoubtedly been
essentially like the oceans of to-day — not in extent and position, but in
their character of place of habitation for animals. The environment is so
simple and uniform that there is little demand for diversity of habits and
consequent diversity of body structure. Where life is easy there is no
necessity for complex structure or complicated habits of living. So the
simplest animals, unseen by us, and so inferior to us in elaborateness of
body structure and habit, swarm in countless hordes in all the oceans and
rivers and lakes, and live successfully their simple lives.

7905

Secrets of the Ocean

WILLIAM BEEBE

From Log of the Sun

I. INTEREST OF THE SEASHORE

CONSIDERED FROM THE STANDPOINT OF

the scientist, the tourist, or the enthusiastic lover of Nature, the
shore of the sea — its sands and waters, its ever-changing skies and moods
— is one of the most interesting spots in the world. The very bottom of
the deep bays near shore — dark and eternally silent, prisoned under the
restless waste of waters — is thickly carpeted with strange and many-col-
ored forms of animal and vegetable life. But the beaches and tide-pools
over which the moon-urged tides hold sway in their ceaseless rise and
fall, teem with marvels of Nature's handiwork, and every day are re-
stocked and replanted with new living objects, both arctic and tropical
offerings of each heaving tidal pulse.

Here on the northeastern shores of our continent one may spend days of
leisure or delightful study among the abundant and ever-changing variety
of wonderful living creatures. It is not unlikely that the enjoyment and
absolute novelty of this new world may enable one to look on these as
some of the most pleasant days of life. I write from the edge of the rest-
less waters of Fundy, but any rock-strewn shore will duplicate the marvels.

2. THE SEASHORE AT HIGH TIDE

At high tide the surface of the Bay is unbroken by rock or shoal, and
stretches glittering in the sunlight from the beach at one's feet to where
the New Brunswick shore is just visible, appearing like a low bluish cloud
on the horizon. At times the opposite shore is apparently brought nearer
and made more distinct by a mirage, which inverts it, together with any
ships which are in sight. A brig may be seen sailing along keel upward,
in the most matter-of-fact way. The surface may anon be torn by those

395

396 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

fearful squalls for which Fundy is noted, or, calm as a mirror, reflect
the blue sky with an added greenish tinge, troubled only by the gentle
alighting of a gull, the splash of a kingfisher or occasional osprey, as
these dive for their prey, or the ruffling which shows where a school of
mackerel is passing. This latter sign always sends the little sailing dories
hurrying out, where they beat back and forth, like shuttles traveling
across a loom, and at each turn a silvery struggling form is dragged into
the boat. . . .

If we watch awhile we will see a line of blackish seaweed and wet
sand appearing along the edge of the water, showing that the tide has
turned and begun to recede. In an hour it has ebbed a considerable distance,
and if we clamber down over the great weather-worn rocks the hardy
advance guard of that wonderful world of life under the water is seen.
Barnacles whiten the top of every rock which is reached by the tide,,
although the water may cover them only a short time each day. But they
flourish here in myriads, and the shorter the chance they have at the
salt water the more frantically their little feathery feet clutch at the tiny
food particles which float around them. These thousands of tiny turreted
castles are built so closely together that many are pressed out of shape,
paralleling in shape as in substance the inorganic crystals of the mineral
kingdom. The valved doors are continually opening and partly closing,
and if we listen quietly we can hear a perpetual shuss! shuss! Is it the
creaking of the tiny hinges ? As the last receding wave splashes them, they
shut their folding doors over a drop or two and remain tightly closed,
while perhaps ten hours of sunlight bake them, or they glisten in the
moonlight for the same length of time, ready at the first touch of the re-
turning water to open wide and welcome it.

A little lower down we come to the zone of mussels, — hanging in
clusters like some strange sea-fruit. Each is attached by strands of thin
silky cables, so tough that they often defy our utmost efforts to tear a
specimen away. How secure these creatures seem, how safe from all harm,
and yet they have enemies which make havoc among them. At high tide
fishes come and crunch them, shells and all, and multitudes of carnivo-
rous snails are waiting to set their file-like tongues at work, which merci-
lessly drill through the lime shells, bringing death in a more subtle but
no less certain form. Storms may tear away the support of these poor
mollusks, and the waves dash them far out of the reach of the tides,
while at low water, crows and gulls use all their ingenuity to get at
their toothsome flesh.

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN 397

3. THE SEASHORE AT LOW TIDE

There are no ant-hills in the sea, but when we turn over a large stone
and see scores upon scores of small black shrimps scurrying around,
the resemblance to those insects is striking. These little creatures quickly
hitch away on their sides, getting out of sight in a remarkably short time.

The tide is going down rapidly, and following it step by step novel
sights meet the eye at every turn, and we begin to realize that in this
narrow strip, claimed alternately by sea and land, which would be
represented on a map by the finest of hair-lines, there exists a complete
world of animated life, comparing in variety and numbers with the life in
that thinner medium air. We climb over enormous boulders, so different in
appearance that they would never be thought to consist of the same mate-
rial as those higher up on the shore. These are masses of wave-worn rock,
twenty or thirty feet across, piled in every imaginable position, and com-
pletely covered with a thick padding of seaweed. Their drapery of algae
hangs in festoons, and if we draw aside these submarine curtains, scenes
from a veritable fairyland are disclosed. Deep pools of water, clear as
crystal and icy cold, contain creatures both hideous and beautiful, somber
and iridescent, formless and of exquisite shape.

4. SEA-ANEMONES

The sea-anemones first attract attention, showing as splashes of scarlet
and salmon among the olive-green seaweed, or in hundreds covering the
entire bottom of a pool with a delicately hued mist of waving tentacles.
As the water leaves these exposed on the walls of the caves, they lose their
plump appearance and, drawing in their wreath of tentacles, hang limp
and shrivelled, resembling pieces of water-soaked meat as much as any-
thing. Submerged in the icy water they are veritable animal-flowers. Their
beauty is indeed well guarded, hidden by the overhanging seaweed in these
caves twenty-five feet or more below high-water mark.

Here in these beautiful caverns we may make aquariums, and trans-
plant as many animal-flowers as we wish. Wherever we place them their
fleshy, snail-like foot spreads out, takes tight hold, and the creature lives
content, patiently waiting for the Providence of the sea to send food to
its many wide-spread fingers.

Carpeted with pink algae and dainty sponges, draped with sea-lettuce
like green tissue paper, decorated with strange corallines, these natural
aquariums far surpass any of artificial make. Although the tide drives us
from them sooner or later, we may return with the sure prospect of find-
ing them refreshed and perhaps replenished with many new forms. For

398 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

often some of the deep-water creatures are held prisoners in the lower
tidepools, as the water settles, somewhat as when the glaciers receded
northward after the Ice Age there were left on isolated mountain peaks
traces of the boreal fauna and flora.

If we are interested enough to watch our anemones we will find much
entertainment. Let us return to our shrimp colonies and bring a handful
to our pool. Drop one in the center of an anemone and see how quickly
it contracts. The tentacles bend over it exactly as the sticky hairs of the
sun-dew plant close over a fly. The shrimp struggles for a moment and
is then drawn downward out of sight. The birth of an anemone is well
worth patient watching, and this may take place in several different ways.
We may see a large individual with a number of tiny bunches on the
sides of the body, and if we keep this one in a tumbler, before long these
protuberances will be seen to develop a few tentacles and at last break off
as perfect miniature anemones. Or again, an anemone may draw in its
tentacles without apparent cause, and after a few minutes expand more
widely than ever. Suddenly a movement of the mouth is seen, and it opens,
and one, two, or even a half-dozen tiny anemones shoot forth. They turn
and roll in the little spurt of water and gradually settle to the rock along-
side of the mother. In a short time they turn right side up, expand their
absurd little heads, and begin life for themselves. These animal "buds"
may be of all sizes; some minute ones will be much less developed and look
very unlike the parent. These are able to swim about for a while, and
myriads of them may be born in an hour. Others, as we have seen, have
tentacles and settle down at once.

5. FISH AND JELLY-FISH

Fishes, little and big, are abundant in the pools, darting here and there
among the leathery fronds of "devils' aprons," cavernous-mouthed angler
fish, roly-poly young lump-suckers, lithe butter-fish and many others.

Moving slowly through the pools are many beautiful creatures, some so
evanescent that they are only discoverable by the faint shadows which
they cast on the bottom, others suggest animated spheres of prismatic
sunlight. These latter are tiny jelly-fish, circular hyaline masses of jelly
with eight longitudinal bands, composed of many comb-like plates, along
which iridescent waves of light continually play. The graceful appearance of
these exquisite creatures is increased by two long, fringed tentacles stream-
ing behind, drifting at full length or contracting into numerous coils. The
fringe on these streamers is a series of living hairs — an aquatic cobweb,
each active with life, and doing its share in ensnaring minute atoms of
food for its owner. When dozens of these ctenophores (or comb-bearers)

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN 399

as they are called, glide slowly to and fro through a pool, the sight is not
soon forgotten. To try to photograph them is like attempting to portray
the substance of a sunbeam, but patience works wonders, and even a
slightly magnified image of a living jelly is secured, which shows very
distinctly all the details of its wonderfully simple structure; the pouch,
suspended in the center of the sphere, which does duty as a stomach;
the sheaths into which the long tentacles may be so magically packed, and
the tiny organ at the top of this living ball of spun glass, serving, with its
minute weights and springs, as compass, rudder, and pilot to this little
creature, which does not fear to pit its muscles of jelly against the rush
and might of breaking waves. . . .

Other equally beautiful forms of jelly-fish are balloon-shaped. These are
Beroe fitly named after the daughter of the old god Oceanus. They, like
others of their family, pulsate through the water, sweeping gracefully
along, borne on currents of their own making.

6. STARFISH AND SEA-URCHINS

Passing to other inhabitants of the pools, we find starfish and sea-urchins
everywhere abundant. Hunched-up groups of the former show where they
are dining in their unique way on unfortunate sea-snails or anemones,
protruding their whole stomach and thus engulfing their victim. The
urchins strain and stretch with their innumerable sucker-feet, feeling for
something to grasp, and in this laborious way pull themselves along.
The mouth, with the five so-called teeth, is a conspicuous feature, visible
at the center of the urchin and surrounded by the greenish spines. Some
of the starfish are covered with long spines, others are nearly smooth.
The colors are wonderfully varied, — red, purple, orange, yellow, etc.

The stages through which these prickly skinned animals pass, before
they reach the adult state, are wonderfully curious, and only when they are
seen under the microscope can they be fully appreciated. A bolting-cloth
net drawn through some of the pools will yield thousands in many stages,
and we can take eggs of the common starfish and watch their growth
in tumblers of water. At first the egg seems nothing but a tiny round
globule of jelly, but soon a dent or depression appears on one side, which
becomes deeper and deeper until it extends to the center of the egg-
mass. It is as if we should take a round ball of putty and gradually press
our finger into it. This pressed-in sac is a kind of primitive stomach and
the entrance is used as a mouth. After this follows a marvellous succession
of changes, form giving place to form, differing more in appearance and
structure from the five-armed starfish than a caterpillar differs from a
butterfly. . . .

400 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

7. SEA-WORMS, SHRIMPS, AND PRAWNS

But to return to our tide-pools. In the skimming net with the young
starfish many other creatures are found, some so delicate and fragile that
they disintegrate before microscope and camera can be placed in position.
I lie at full length on a soft couch of seaweed with my face close to a tiny
pool no larger than my hand. A few armadillo shells and limpets crawl
on the bottom, but a frequent troubling of the water baffles me. I make
sure my breath has nothing to do with it, but still it continues. At last a
beam of sunshine lights up the pool, and as if a film had rolled from my
eyes I see the cause of the disturbance. A sea-worm — or a ghost of one — is
swimming about. Its large, brilliant eyes, long tentacles, and innumerable
waving appendages are now as distinct as before they had been invisible.
A trifling change in my position and all vanishes as if by magic. There
seems not an organ, not a single part of the creature, which is not as
transparent as the water itself. The fine streamers into which the paddles
and gills are divided are too delicate to have existence in any but a
water creature, and the least attempt to lift the animal from its element
would only tear and dismember it, so I leave it in the pool to await the
return of the tide.

Shrimps and prawns of many shapes and colors inhabit every pool.
One small species, abundant on the algae, combines the color changes of a
chameleon with the form and manner of travel of a measuring-worm,
looping along the fronds of seaweed or swimming with the same motion.
Another variety of shrimp resembles the common wood-louse found under
pieces of bark, but is most beautifully iridescent, glowing like an opal at
the bottom of the pool. The curious little sea-spiders keep me guessing
for a long time where their internal organs can be, as they consist of legs
with merely enough body to connect these firmly together. The fact that
the thread-like stomach and other organs send a branch into each of the
eight legs explains the mystery and shows how far economy of space may
go. Their skeleton-forms, having the appearance of eight straggling fila-
ments of seaweed, are thus, doubtless, a great protection to these creatures
from their many enemies. Other hobgoblin forms with huge probosces
crawl slowly over the floors of the anemone caves, or crouch as the shadow
of my hand or net falls upon them.

The larger gorgeously colored and graceful sea-worms contribute not a
small share to the beauty of Fundy tide-pools, swimming in iridescent
waves through the water or waving their Medusa-heads of crimson tentacles
at the bottom among the sea-lettuce. These worms form tubes of mud

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN 401

for themselves, and the rows of hooks on each side of the body enable
them to climb up and down in their dismal homes.

8. HYDROIDS

Much of the seaweed from deeper bottoms seems to be covered with a
dense fur, which under a hand lens resolves into beautiful hydroids, —
near relatives of the anemones and corals. Scientists have happily given
these most euphonious names — Campanularia, Obelia, and Plumularia.
Among the branches of certain of these, numbers of round discs or spheres
are visible. These are young medusae or jelly-fish, which grow like bunches
of currants, and later will break off and swim around at pleasure in the
water. Occasionally one is fortunate enough to discover these small jellies
in a pool where they can be photographed as they pulsate back and forth.
When these attain their full size they lay eggs which sink to the bottom
and grow up into the plant-like hydroids. So each generation of these
interesting creatures is entirely unlike that which immediately precedes or
follows it. In other words, a hydroid is exactly like its grandmother and
granddaughter, but as different from its parents and children in appear-
ance as a plant is from an animal. Even in a fairy-story book this would
be wonderful, but here it is taking place under our very eyes, as are scores
of other transformations and "miracles in miniature" in this marvellous
underworld.

9. UNDER THE SURFACE

Now let us deliberately pass by all the attractions of the middle zone
of tide-pools and on as far as the lowest level of the water will admit. We
are far out from the shore and many feet below the level of the barnacle-
covered boulders over which we first clambered. Now we may indeed be
prepared for strange sights, for we are on the very border-land of the vast
unknown. The abyss in front of us is like planetary space, unknown to the
feet of man. While we know the latter by scant glimpses through our
telescopes, the former has only been scratched by the hauls of the dredge,
the mark of whose iron shoe is like the tiny track of a snail on the leaf
mould of a vast forest.

The first plunge beneath the icy waters of Fundy is likely to remain
long in one's memory, and one's first dive of short duration, but the
glimpse which is had and the hastily snatched handfuls of specimens of
the beauties which no tide uncovers, is potent to make one forget his
shivering and again and again seek to penetrate as far as a good-sized stone
and a lungful of air will carry him. Strange sensations are experienced in
these aquatic scrambles. It takes a long time to get used to pulling oneself

402 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

downward, or propping your knees against the under crevices of rocks.
To all intents and purposes, the law of gravitation is partly suspended
and when stone and wooden wedge accidentally slip from one's hand
and disappear in opposite directions, it is confusing, to say the least.

When working in one spot for some time the fishes seem to become
used to one, and approach quite closely. Slick-looking pollock, bloated
lump-fish, and occasionally a sombre dog-fish roll by, giving one a start,
as the memory of pictures of battles between divers and sharks of tropical
waters comes to mind. One's mental impressions made thus are somewhat
disconnected. With the blood buzzing in the ears, it is only possible to
snatch general glimpses and superficial details. Then at the surface, notes
can be made, and specimens which have been overlooked, felt for during
the next trip beneath the surface. Fronds of laminaria yards in length,
like sheets of rubber, offer convenient holds, and at their roots many
curious creatures make their homes. Serpent starfish, agile as insects and
very brittle, are abundant, and new forms of worms, like great slugs, —
their backs covered with gills in the form of tufted branches.

In these outer, eternally submerged regions are starfish of still other
shapes, some with a dozen or more arms. I took one with thirteen rays
and placed it temporarily in a pool aquarium with some large anemones.
On returning in an hour or two I found the starfish trying to make a
meal of the largest anemone. Hundreds of dart-covered strings had been
pushed out by the latter in defense, but they seemed to cause the starfish
no inconvenience whatever.

In my submarine glimpses I saw spaces free from seaweed on which
hundreds of tall polyps were growing, some singly, others in small tufts.
The solitary individuals rise three or four inches by nearly straight stalks,
surmounted by many-tentacled heads. These droop gracefully to one side
and the general effect is that of beds of rose-covered flowers. From
the heads hang grape-like masses, which on examination in a tumbler
are seen to be immature medusae. Each of these develop to the point where
the four radiating canals are discernible and then their growth comes to a
standstill, and they never attain the freedom for which their structure fits
them.

When the wind blew inshore, I would often find the water fairly alive
with large sun-jellies or Aurelia, — their Latin name. Their great milky-
white bodies would come heaving along and bump against me, giving a
very "crawly" sensation. The circle of short tentacles and the four horse-
shoe-shaped ovaries distinguish this jelly-fish from all others. When I had
gone down as far as I dared, I would sometimes catch glimpses of these
strange beings far below me, passing and repassing in the silence and icy

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN 403

coldness of the watery depths. These large medusae are often very abun-
dant after a favorable wind has blown for a few days, and I have rowed
through masses of them so thick that it seemed like rowing through
thick jelly, two or three feet deep. In an area the length of the boat and
about a yard wide, I have counted over one hundred and fifty Aurelias
on the surface alone.

When one of these "sun-fish," as the fishermen call them, is lifted from
the water, the clay-colored eggs may be seen to stream from it in myriads.
In many jellies, small bodies the size of a pea are visible in the interior
of the mass, and when extracted they prove to be a species of small shrimp.
These are well adapted for their quasi-parasitic life, in color being through-
out of the same milky semi-opaqueness as their host, but one very curious
thing about them is, that when taken out and placed in some water in a
vial or tumbler they begin to turn darker almost immediately, and in five
minutes all will be of various shades, from red to dark brown.

I had no fear of Aurelia, but when another free-swimming species of
jelly-fish, Cyanea, or the blue-jelly, appeared, I swam ashore with all
speed. This great jelly is usually more of a reddish liver-color than a
purple, and is much to be dreaded. Its tentacles are of enormous length.
I have seen specimens which measured two feet across the disc, with
streamers fully forty feet long, and one has been recorded seven feet across
and no less than one hundred and twelve feet to the tip of the cruel tenta-
cles! These trail behind in eight bunches and form a living, tangled
labyrinth as deadly as the hair of the fabled Medusa — whose name indeed
has been so appropriately applied to this division of animals. The touch
of each tentacle to the skin is like a lash of nettle, and there would be
little hope for a diver whose path crossed such a fiery tangle. The untold
myriads of little darts which are shot out secrete a poison which is terribly
irritating.

On the crevice bottoms a sight now and then meets my eyes which
brings the "devil-fish" of Victor Hugo's romance vividly to mind, —
a misshapen squid making its way snakily over the shells and seaweed.
Its large eyes gaze fixedly around and the arms reach alternately forward,
the sucking cups lined with their cruel teeth closing over the inequalities
of the bottom. The creature may suddenly change its mode of progression
and shoot like an arrow, backward and upward. If we watch one in its
passage over areas of seaweed and sand, a wonderful adaptation becomes
apparent. Its color changes continually; when near sand it is of a sober
brown hue, then blushes of color pass over it and the tint changes, corre-
sponding to the seaweed or patches of pink sponge over which it swims.
The way in which this is accomplished is very ingenious and loses nothing

404 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

by examination. Beneath the skin are numerous cells filled with liquid
pigment. When at rest these contract until they are almost invisible, appear-
ing as very small specks or dots on the surface of the body. When the
animal wishes to change its hue, certain muscles which radiate from these
color cells are shortened, drawing the cells out in all directions until they
seem confluent. It is as if the freckles on a person's face should be all
joined together, when an ordinary tan would result.

10. THE DEPTHS

From bottoms ten to twenty fathoms below the surface, the dredge
brings up all manner of curious things; basket starfish, with arms divided
and sub-divided into many tendrils, on the tips of which it walks, the
remaining part converging upward like the trellis of a vine-covered
summer house. Sponges of many hues must fairly carpet large areas of
the deep water, as the dredge is often loaded with them. The small shore-
loving ones which I photographed are in perfect health, but the camera
cannot show the many tiny currents of water pouring in food and oxygen
at the smaller openings, and returning in larger streams from the tall
funnels on the surface of the sponge, which a pinch of carmine dust
reveals so beautifully. From the deeper aquatic gardens come up great
orange and yellow sponges, two and three feet in length, and around the
bases of these the weird serpent stars are clinging, while crabs scurry
away as the mass reaches the surface of the water.

Treasures from depths of forty and even fifty fathoms can be obtained
when a trip is taken with the trawl-men. One can sit fascinated for hours,
watching the hundreds of yards of line reel in, with some interesting
creature on each of the thirty-seven hundred odd hooks. At times a glance
down into the clear water will show a score of fish in sight at once, hake,
haddock, cod, halibut, dog-fish, and perhaps an immense "barn-door"
skate, a yard or more square. This latter will hold back with frantic
flaps of its great "wings," and tax all the strength of the sturdy Acadian
fishermen to pull it to the gunwale.

Now and then a huge "meat-rock," the fishermen's apt name for an
anemone, comes up, impaled on a hook, and still clinging to a stone of five
to ten pounds full weight. These gigantic scarlet ones from fifty fathoms
far surpass any near shore. Occasionally the head alone of a large fish will
appear, with the entire body bitten clean off, a hint of the monsters which
must haunt the lower depths. The pressure of the air must be excessive,
for many of the fishes have their swimming bladders fairly forced out of
their mouths by the lessening of atmospheric pressure as they are drawn
to the surface. When a basket starfish finds one of the baits in that sunless

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN 405

void far beneath our boat, he hugs it so tenaciously that the upward jerks
of the reel only make him hold the more tightly.

Once in a great while the fishermen find what they call a "knob-fish"
on one of their hooks, and I never knew what they meant until one day
a small colony of five was brought ashore. Boltenia, the scientists call
them, tall, queer-shaped things; a stalk six to eight inches in length, with
a knob or oblong bulb-like body at the summit, looking exactly like the
flower of a lady-slipper orchid and as delicately colored. This is a member
of that curious family of Ascidians, which forever trembles in the balance
between the higher back-boned animals and the lower division, where are
classified the humbler insects, crabs, and snails. The young of Boltenia
promises everything in its tiny backbone or notochord, but it all ends in
promise, for that shadow of a great ambition withers away, and the
creature is doomed to a lowly and vegetative life. If we soften the hard
scientific facts which tell us of these dumb, blind creatures, with the
humane mellowing thought of the oneness of all life, we will find much
that is pathetic and affecting in their humble biographies from our point
of view. And yet these cases of degeneration are far from anything like
actual misfortunes, or mishaps of nature, as Buffon was so fond of think-
ing. These creatures have found their adult mode of life more free from
competition than any other, and hence their adoption of it. It is only
another instance of exquisite adaptation to an unfilled niche in the life
of the world.

1906

The Warrior Ants

CARYL P. RASKINS

From Of Ants and Men

WHENEVER A SOCIAL GROUP HAS BECOME SO EFFI-
ciently organized that it has gained access to an adequate supply
of food and has learned to distribute it among its members so well that
wealth considerably exceeds immediate demands, it can be depended upon
to utilize its surplus energy in the attempt to enlarge the sphere in which
it is active. This condition, of course, parallels that of any growing organ-
ism, and it inevitably leads to expansionist policies. Expansion may be
internal, as in the democratic human states and in very loosely-knit colo-
nial organizations among ants, wherein the "interstices" of the social
structure, so to speak, are large enough to permit considerable growth with-
out the resistance of external pressure. Among more closely-knit societies
of ants and men, however, this opportunity for internal growth is absent,
and the only alternative is the subjugation of additional territory as feed-
ing ground, and, at times, the domination of other organisms to aid in
the program of expansion.

The structure of ant colonies renders them particularly prone to this sort
of expansionist policy. With very few exceptions, ants of any given colony
are hostile to those of any other community, even of the same species, and
this condition is bound to produce preliminary bickering among colonies
which are closely associated, even when they are very young. Beautiful
examples of this sort of thing can be seen in the tropics among ants which
habitually nest in cavities of plants, such as the ants of the genus Azteca,
which nest in the hollow twigs of trees of the genus Cecropia. While the
trees are quite young and inconspicuous members of the forest, their older
twigs are entered by numbers of young, newly dealated queens of Azteca,
seeking convenient and secluded spots in which to begin their colonies.
The branches of many species of Cecropia are by habit spongy in the
interior, but are supported at intervals by rtiore solid woody septa. The

406

THE WARRIOR ANTS 407

young queens hollow out the pithy portions to make their chambers,
but leave the septa intact, thus isolating themselves from one another.
This condition suits their purpose well, for, with very few exceptions,
young queens dislike one another's society after the marriage flight, even
though they be from the same colony. They are far from aggressive, how-
ever, and their natural inclination, when thrown together, is merely to
build up walls between themselves. This represents the only truly
tolerant phase in the life of the normal ant colony. Numbers of Azteca
queens may come thus to reside side by side in a young developing
Cecropia. Although they live in close proximity to one another, they have
no communication. To all intents and purposes they are completely
unaware of one another's existence.

This condition is too good to last. Young first broods of workers shortly
come to maturity in each of the incipient communities, and perforate the
walls of their homes to obtain egress to the surface of the twig. Their busi-
ness in life is to bring home as much food as possible from the outside world.
In this effort, all the workers of all the colonies are immediately brought
into sharp competition for food sources, and the members of each colony
are implacably hostile to those from any other. This condition shortly leads
to much individual combat and the loss of very many workers, to the
detriment of the growth of all the colonies. If the colonies be numerous,
and of about the same age and strength, minor conflicts of this sort may
persist for a long time, and the development of all the groups be seriously
affected; for at this stage the loss of a single worker is a tremendous
disadvantage to colonial growth. No one community will dare to invade
the nest-chamber of another, because their relative strength is so nearly
equal as to make the undertaking a highly hazardous one.

Eventually, however, as the Cecropia tree grows and emerges into the
sunlight, as the number of its branches increases, as the foraging space
upon it expands and the quantity of insect life parasitic upon it and
available to the Azteca ants as food becomes greater, the condition of
equilibrium in strength among colonies is bound to be disturbed. Some
one or two communities become more favorably situated than the rest
with respect to food supplies, and the numbers composing the groups
increase correspondingly more rapidly. Pressure for room is felt by the
fortunate colony in its narrow internodal chamber, and, emboldened by
its increased numbers, it perforates the septum which sets it apart from its
neighboring community. Immediate warfare ensues, in which the entire
colony participates, and there are usually very considerable losses on both
sides. Ultimately, the weaker colony is forced to flee the site and to
seek dwelling elsewhere, usually entirely off the tree. With it will be

408 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

carried such of its young as its surviving members can transport. The rest,
abandoned in cavities of the deserted nest, will be found by the invaders.
The young of alien colonies of ants are usually accepted and adopted by
other members of the species, so these are quite likely to be added to the
brood pile of the invaders, to swell the numbers of their next developing
generation. The adopted insects, since their whole learning period as
young adults will be spent in the company of the invaders, will become
loyal members of their foster community.

The invading colony now settles in its new territory, re-excavates it,
redesigns it to suit its own ends, and proceeds as before. Expansion of
numbers is now quickened by the new opportunities for food-gathering
which its conquest has brought. Later, the pressure of numbers is again
felt, and the colony undertakes the raiding of a third community of its
neighbors, with results similar to the second raid. The new territory,
food-supply, and breeding and foraging grounds are appropriated in the
same manner. In the meantime, similar strife has been going on among
local neighboring communities on other parts of the tree, resulting in the
selective elimination of all but a very few colonies. The interval between
wars is longer now, for there is more room for development, and warfare,
among ants as among men, is rarely undertaken for the fun of it. However,
it is inevitable that the few remaining colonies, now enormously strength-
ened in numbers, should come into intolerable rivalry. The campaigns are
now on a very much larger scale, are more elaborately carried forward,
are more boldly waged, and last much longer. Finally, however, a single
community will win and will dominate the entire tree. By the time the
Cecropia has attained a large stature, it will be completely controlled by
one colony of ants, and life for any alien upon it will be made so unpleas-
ant that henceforward no young queens will attempt to start colonies
there, and ant communities of other trees will not find it worth while to
attempt campaigns there. The domination of the world, so far as the world
lies within the ken of Azteca, has been completed, and henceforward a
totalitarian state pursues a peaceful course, up to the point of its ultimate
dissolution from internal causes.

The course of the conflicts just referred to is characteristic of the wars
of the majority of ants. It is equally characteristic of the soil-nesting
species which occur about our homes, although here the greater oppor-
tunities to find food, while avoiding neighboring colonies, allow stronger
communities to coexist near to one another. However, the raiding spirit
may be emphasized in many ants, to the extent that they become
habitual pillagers of the colonies of aliens. In such cases, they quickly rob
the domicile and as quickly depart, making no attempt at a permanent

THE WARRIOR ANTS 409

occupation. This habit is widely distributed among ants in general, and is
particularly characteristic of the first of the slave-makers.

Such colonial warfare finds innumerable parallels in human society. It
is especially characteristic of early tribal life the world over, and every
young culture is featured by tribal wars similar to the intercolonial wars
of young ant communities. So far, however, we have presented no ana-
logue of the large-scale warfare which occupies mankind in its maturer
years.

Before large-scale warfare can appear among ants, it is necessary that
some sort of cooperation be exhibited between neighboring colonies of
the same species. For the biological structure of ant society presages that
the numbers of any single group must be limited by the fertility of one or
a very few queens, and single colonies cannot hope to be great enough to
accomplish any sort of world domination so long as they are without
allies.

The first step in the changing of this condition is to be seen among
certain rather benign earth-loving ants of the Formicine subfamily, notably
in the genus Acanthomyops. These ants possess a very strong odor, so
pronounced as to be readily sensed by human beings and to possess a
marked resemblance to oil of citronella. Perhaps because of the strength
of this odor, the far more delicate, presumably odoriferous, differences
between ants of different colonies of the same species are not perceived.
In any event, it has been noticed by many observers that differing colonies
of this insect rather readily and peacefully fuse to form super-communi-
ties. This fact can easily be checked by any reader, since the ant is com-
monly found about many houses and gardens. Fusion results in the
formation of a peaceful, giant community, and has very little if any
effect upon the expansionist policy of the group. These ants are slow-
moving and subterranean, largely vegetarian in habit, and are in the
pastoral stage of development. They keep great numbers of root aphids,
which are carefully attended, and whose cultivation provides a satisfactory
store of nutriment in a restricted feeding territory, and absorbs so much
of the energies of the nurses that little effort is spent in acquiring more
than a modest portion of soil, considering the size of the community.
The tendency of these ants to mix with one another is of great significance,
however, for as soon as any species of ant acquires the power to form a
large state of ants of that species, its power of world domination becomes
very greatly increased.

Pheidole megacephala is a small yellow Myrmicine ant, now known in
the tropics around the world. The ant possesses the sharp differentiation
into soldier and worker castes characteristic of its genus, and is distinctly

410 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

aggressive. It appears originally to have been a grain-harvesting species,
at least in part, like so many of its allies, and the structure of the mandi-
bles of the soldiers, admirably fitted to act as crushers for hard objects, is
still retained. In times of need it reverts, even today, to its ancient habits.
Its original home was in the tropics of the Old World, presumably in
some relatively dry region in which its grain-harvesting habits would be
of particular value. The island of Madagascar seems its most likely
homeland, since the greatest numbers of its varieties are found there.
Megacephala, however, seems to have been characterized by a degree of
energy, as a race, and a degree of acuteness, as an exploiter of its environ-
ment, which are astonishing. Within the last century it began a campaign
of exploitation which has left it racially predominant in the tropics
throughout the world. This is a very different sort of conquest from the
simple colonial warfare which we have surveyed, and is worth careful
analysis.

Abandoning the seed-harvesting habits which have for thousands of
years been characteristics of its genus, megacephala took up two new
habits which have been of tremendous significance. It began to cultivate
aphids and other coccids, thus reverting from an agricultural to a pastoral
existence, and it became adapted to nesting in ships and other convey-
ances used by man. While it retained its ability to survive in dry areas,
it sought environments, such as man-made structures, which were prac-
tically free from the social competition of other species. Once it had
undertaken the role of the house and ship ant, it was literally transported
to the ends of the earth. It was introduced into many islands of the
Atlantic and Pacific, and proceeded in its conquest in a very definite way.
We have a particularly good picture of the way in which this happened
in Madeira, thanks to the observations of Heer.

Phcidole megacephala apparently came into Madeira early in the
nineteenth century. At first it confined its nesting sites and its foraging
activities almost wholly to the houses and gardens of the settlers, where
food was abundant and the competition of foreign species small. New
types of bulbs and other plants appeared in the settlers' gardens, and
before long they became infested with aphids and such sweet-excreting
insects. Pheidole promptly took charge of these insects, encouraged their
increase, and fed largely upon the manna which they produced. Grad-
ually, as the pressure within its own species increased, and as the native
ants weakened with the advent of man, Pheidole pushed back into
unsettled territory. It first established itself in the bleaker, less hospitable
regions of the Island, in which it alone was fitted to survive. With these
regions as a base, it shortly raided more attractive ground, and began a

THE WARRIOR ANTS 411

steady, deadly push against the less hardy, less adaptable, and less organ-
ized types. Mass raids are the rule with Pheidole, and hosts of the tiny
creatures evidently invaded nest after nest of larger but more loosely
organized species, killing the queens, and forcing the workers to evacuate.
Their own losses in workers were terrific, but the great fecundity of their
queens maintained the pressure of numbers, and the race pushed onward.
When Heer visited Madeira in 1852, no species of ant save Phcidole
could be found. It had occupied every crack and cranny from the shore
line to the highest crest of the Island, and had become a serious house
pest. Outdoors it fed on dead insects, occasionally on seeds, and cultivated
aphids and other forms of nectar-producing insects. Indoors it abandoned
every form of raiding and cultivation and subsisted quite simply on
human food stuffs.

Once the conquest of the Old World was fairly under way, Pheidole
crossed the Atlantic and established itself in various places in the West
Indies and elsewhere in the New World. And here it may now be seen
in the process of establishing its conquest. The Bermuda Islands, in 1929,
were rather extensively occupied by a handsome species of Odontomachus^
known as Odontomachus hcematoda, var. insularis. This genus of ant
represents one of the most active, resourceful, and aggressive of the
Ponerines of today — one of the very few which is in any sense dominant
among modern ants. It is probably of relatively recent origin among
Ponerines, as the evolution of that ancient subfamily goes, and is distrib-
uted, in one species or another, around the world, hcematoda being espe-
cially widespread. The ants are large, active, and aggressive, and in all
probability represent the remains of a fauna which was nearly dominant
among the Ponerines in late Tertiary times. Individually, it is far superior
in size, strength, and sense-organs to Pheidole. Its colonies, however,
although large and closely-knit for a Ponerine, are still far inferior in
numbers and powers of coordination to those of the tiny megacephala.
In 1929, Odontomachus was quite abundant on the higher parts of the
main island of Bermuda, nesting particularly under stones and logs in
the rich, grassy vales of the cedar groves. Along the shore line, existing
in the most inhospitable situations in shifting sands and between blocks
of coral, almost exposed to the salt spray, were numerous active commu-
nities of Pheidole megacephala which had probably come on a ship not
long before. Today Odontomachus hcematoda is almost extinct in its
former haunts among the cedars, and instead Pheidole colonies are to be
found in every patch of sod. In the few Odontomachus colonies remaining
on the Islands great numbers of Pheidole workers are to be found killing

412 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

and carrying off the larva?, fastening themselves in myriads to the bodies
of the workers, and forcing their early abandonment of the site.

Within another ten years, the Ponerine species, which has inhabited
Bermuda as its undisturbed Arthropod mistress for millennia, and has in
fact developed a characteristic variety there, will have been exterminated.
Such are the powers which lie in close social organization and large-scale
concerted action among ants, as among men.

Pheidole megacephala, while far inferior in strength and senses, as an
individual, to Odontomachus, is much superior in organization. It is,
however, a Myrmicine ant, and the Myrmicine organizations are excelled
as a whole by those of the Formicines and certain Dolichoderines. This
is true of the Dolichoderine genus Iridomyrmex, and a species of this
group, humilis, recently undertook a drive for world domination which
has been even more striking and successful than that of Pheidole.

The workers of Iridomyrmex humilis are tiny, soft-bodied, dark-colored
insects of extremely active, nervous habit. They are somewhat smaller
than the workers even of the tiny Pheidole, and, instead of being pro-
tected by a heavy chitinous armor, they are very fragile and easily
destroyed. Unlike Pheidole, they have no sting whatever, and the only
means of individual defense which they possess is a white, sticky secretion
which can be emitted from the anal glands, but which is of very dubious
value as a weapon. Altogether this creature would seem much less able
than Pheidole to cope with the world. Humilis, however, possesses certain
social advantages over Pheidole. The members of its colony are more
closely coordinated than those even of Pheidole. They habitually forage
in column, and their sensitiveness enables them to exploit new advantages
more readily than the more stolid Myrmicine. Of particular advantage to
them is the distribution of their reproductive function. Pheidole has
retained the ancient Myrmicine habit of rearing very large, bulky queens,
expensive to produce and to maintain, but well adapted to the foundation
of colonies in the classical fashion. Consistent with this behavior-pattern
is the fact that individual colonies of Pheidole ordinarily recognize only
the single queens which founded them. They are therefore highly vulner-
able, for it is only necessary for an invader to slaughter this single queen
to cause the destruction of the colony. Iridomyrmex has remedied this
condition to a remarkable degree. The queens of Iridomyrmex are tiny,
soft-bodied, and active, but little larger in stature than the workers. Very
many are permitted to coexist in a single colony. Queens of this type are
easily and inexpensively reared in large numbers. They are, of course,
unable to found their colonies in the ancient, independent way prevalent
among most ants, but this method is no longer necessary under the new

THE WARRIOR ANTS 413

living conditions of the humilis community. Instead, colonies of these
ants bud and divide again and again, each new division taking a few
queens with it, and thereby rendering itself nearly impregnable against
extermination. The old division of colony from colony, so long prevalent
among ants, has nearly been broken down, and a world-state of a single
species, through which queens may be uniformly distributed, is being
substituted.

Armed with these social weapons, Iridomyrmex humilis a few years
ago undertook a campaign of expansion which has left almost no part
of the tropical world which is inhabited by humans unknown to it. Its
original home seems to have been Argentina. Like Pheidole, it became an
adept at living within houses and ships, and has made extremely good
use of man in extending its range. It apparently entered the United States
at New Orleans several years ago, and thence has spread eastward and
westward along the southern tier of states until today it is known and
detested from Florida to California. It has crossed the Atlantic and has
appeared in such widely separated localities as Portugal and Cape Colony.
It has arrived and established itself in Sicily and in southern Italy, about
Naples. It has infested the Canary Islands, and has made its appearance
in France and in the vicinity of Hamburg in Germany. More clever than
Pheidole in taking full advantage of human habitations, it has used them
to extend its climatic range, and has established itself in Guernsey and in
various parts of the British Isles, even penetrating as far north as Edin-
burgh. Considering the size of the organism, its colonizing travels and
conquests, which have carried it from Argentina to England, and south
and eastward into Asia within a period of little more than fifty years, are
impressive indeed.

Madeira is a crossroads for the traffic of the South Atlantic, and as such
it could hardly better be missed by Iridomyrmex, coming from the western
New World, than by Pheidole in its march from the East. Accordingly,
the former arrived some time between 1852 and 1898, and immediately
came into conflict with Pheidole, which had by 1852 exterminated all of
the native ants of its environment, as we have seen. Nowhere could a
better theatre of action have been found for the observation of this conflict
of two world-conquering races. Proceeding by methods almost identical
with those employed by Pheidole on the same soil a half-century or less
earlier, but undoubtedly with the superior strategy born of its more com-
plex organization, Iridomyrmex completely displaced the earlier invader,
and today Madeira is overrun with the foraging columns of the tiny
brown "Argentine ant" pest, while the Pheidole colonies of yore are not
to be found. The conquest is complete, and the relative merits of this

414 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

Myrmicine and this Dolichoderine ant as world-conquerors have been
determined for all time.

The analogies to human behavior in the local wars and the general
wars of conquest of ants are numerous and obvious. Small tribal warfare
and general wars of replacement have featured human history ever since
society became complex. The analogies in these cases, moreover, seem
to be real throughout, and do not require qualifications. This is true,
of course, because the fundamental aims of conquest — increased food and
shelter — are identical for ants and men, and the means of obtaining them
are similar for both races.

It is less easy to see among ants than among men why some races
should suddenly take up an expansionist policy, and shortly come to
dominate very large tracts, when hitherto their existence had followed the
same quiet pattern as that of surrounding related groups. Pheidole
megacephala is but one species of a huge, structurally homogeneous
genus that is rather thoroughly distributed over both hemispheres. Why
should it alone, of all its contemporaries, suddenly have abandoned the
traditional, peace-loving, grain-harvesting mode of life, and become
extremely fecund and aggressive?

The genus Iridomyrmex, and the allied genus Tapinoma, contain
many species of closely similar insects, all of whose opportunities and
excuses for world expansion would seem to be as obvious as those of
humilis. Yet no one of them has behaved in a fashion even remotely
similar to its brilliant and dramatic, if destructive, relative,

*939

The Vampire Bat

RAYMOND L. DITMARS

AND
ARTHUR M. GREENHALL

qpHE STUDIES OF THE VAMPIRE BAT, DESMODUS

JL rotundus, outlined here were suggested to the senior author in the
summer of 1932 during a collecting trip in Central America. The trip was
concluded with a call upon Dr. Herbert C. Clark, Director of the Gorgas
Memorial Laboratory in Panama. . . . Several vampires were under
observation at the Memorial Laboratory. They had been maintained for
a number of months on a diet of blood obtained at a nearby slaughter-
house and defibrinated to keep it in fluid condition. Here was a demon-
stration of the practicability of maintaining this highly interesting species
as an exhibit at the Zoological Park. Dr. Clark, however, could spare none
of his specimens. . . .

The senior author decided to return to Panama the following summer
and search the caves where vampires had been captured. Hence in August
of 1933, accompanied by Arthur M. Greenhall, then a student at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, Panama was again visited and Dr. Clark provided
guides to explore the Chilibrillo Caves in the Chagres Valley. We were
informed that the caves were of limestone formation, with horizontal
tunnels. In some parts these gave way to large chambers, from which again
other tunnels led into the mountain. We were equipped with headband
lamps and batteries carried on our belts.

In a shack near the caves was an illustration of the frequency with which
humans may be bitten by vampire bats. A boy about 10 years old had been
bitten five times during a week, and always on the under surface of his
toes while he slept. He had bled profusely, and the earthen floor beneath
his slatted bed was blood-stained each morning.

The route to the caves led through cattle trails in low, green tangle, with
ankle-deep mud most of the way, as the period was the rainy season. There

415

416 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

was a steep slope near the caves and a growth of rain forest. The Panaman
guides, pushing through barricades of vines, disclosed a hole in the ground.
It appeared to be little more than the entrance to a coal chute. We slid in
and found ourselves in a horizontal tunnel in which we could walk
upright in single file. The tunnel soon grew wider and higher, the floor
slippery with red mud. Through portions of this entering gallery there was
swiftly flowing water, knee deep in places. It appeared to come through
the sides, then to seep through crevices in the floor. By pointing a light
overhead, a double procession of big bats could be seen, the two streams
flying in opposite directions.

After we had worked forward a fair fraction of a mile, the subterranean
stream gave way again to the slippery floor. The hallway became larger
and now showed side galleries. The guides stopped there to assemble the
handles of the nets by which the bats were to be taken. The atmosphere
was unlike that of caves in the temperate latitudes; the air was hot, heavy,
and sweetish, the latter condition resulting from the odor of thousands of
bats. Common on the limestone walls were huge roaches, of pale, straw
color. Another insect denizen, not apparent without search of nearby
crevices, but possibly common enough, was a small, reddish, blood-sucking
bug, coming under strong suspicion in recent studies of carrying the
organism of Chagas fever, a disease produced by a trypanosome in human
blood, diagnosed and discovered by Dr. Emilio Chagas. Here and there,
in startling contrast on the walls, were spiderlike creatures with a spread
of limbs of 5 inches or more. . . .

We finally entered a big chamber, the arched ceiling of which appeared
to rise about 50 feet. The ceiling looked smooth, yet it was rough enough
to provide a hanging foothold for thousands of bats of several kinds. Each
species hung in a cluster of its own, the smaller, insectivorous kinds and
smaller fruit bats on the sides. Near the dome of the ceiling was a mass of
spear-nosed bats in a cluster about 15 feet in diameter. These bats have a
wing spread of about 20 inches and bodies the size of a rat. Our lights dis-
turbed them and caused a great shuffling of wings and movement of
innumerable faces. There was considerable chattering from these larger
bats, and their teeth showed plainly.

The side galleries were also full of bats and we inspected these in search
of the big carnivorous spear-nosed bats which could not be captured in the
high chamber. We caught 18 and "fought" them into a mesh cage. All
the while we were watching for vampires, which may be distinguished by
their habit of running along the vertical walls and darting into crevices
to hide. In a deep side gallery we found bats of a kind not noted in the
large chamber, but again no vampires. After several hours we retraced

THE VAMPIRE BAT 417

our way along the subterranean stream until, with a feeling of relief from
the oppressive atmosphere, we saw a faint glow that showed we were close
to the entrance of the cave.

After a breathing spell we sought and found the entrance to another
cave shown on our chart. The route sloped easily toward a circular cham-
ber fully 100 feet in diameter, though not more than 8 feet high. Here
were hundreds of bats hanging in clusters, and all of one kind — a medium-
sized spear-nosed bat of a fruit-eating species. They were not timid and
could be closdy approached before they took flight. When a hand was
waved close to them the result was a pouring of winged bodies from the
ceiling until the air was filled. Again we made an unsuccessful search of
the walls for vampires.

The third cavern had an almost vertical entrance through a well-like
shaft. There was not room enough to get down with the nets. We low-
ered ourselves into the hall, reached a horizontal turn-off, and on flashing
our lamps against the wall, saw several bats run like rodents along the
vertical surface, then dart into crevices. We immediately identified them
as vampires, but all escaped.

With lights turned out we waited a half hour, but the bats did not reap-
pear. We explored another gallery and found a spot where a slender man
might squeeze through. We were too fatigued to continue, however.

The only other passage sheered off at a ledge beneath which ran a chan-
nel of water, from wall to wall, which looked as if it were quite deep.
There the day's reconnoiter ended.

The following morning we returned to the cave where the vampires had
been seen and with much caution descended to the widened area, keeping
the lights out and feeling our way. Ready with some small nets we had
prepared the previous evening, we flashed the lights on the wall where the
bats had been seen, but no vampires were anywhere in sight.

We reasoned that the vampires had retreated into the recesses of the
tunnel with the deep water, or into the narrow shaft where only a slender
man could get through. Greenhall worked into this small, horizontal shaft
and saw several vampires in a widened space ahead. He captured two and
the others made their way into the tunnel with the deep water, which
connected with a passage ahead.

Of the two vampires captured, one soon died. It was half grown and
possibly had been injured in the net. The other, an adult female, lived for
approximately 4 months after capture and, slightly more than 3 months
after being caught, gave birth to a single vigorous infant. While as yet we
do not know the period of gestation, the length of time from capture of

418 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

the mother to birth of the young shows a surprisingly long period of preg-
nancy for such a small mammal.

After obtaining the female vampire, we left for the Atlantic side of the
Canal Zone. Dr. Clark provided two quarts of defibrinated blood, fresh
from the automatic refrigerator of his laboratory, but from that moment
until we reached New York the vampire was a problem. We were nat-
urally very keen to get it back alive. We were not worried about the 18 big
carnivorous bats; they were feeding ravenously and fresh meat could be
readily obtained. With an assortment of crates containing reptiles and
amphibians, and cases of preserved specimens for the museums, we
boarded a train for Colon. The defibrinated blood was in a package beside
us, and the cage containing the vampire was swathed in black cloth. Dr.
Clark had cautioned us to get the blood on ice again as soon as possible.

On the Atlantic side it was necessary for the senior author to stop 2 days
at the Navy Submarine Base at Coco Solo to deliver several lectures. The
commanding officer invited us to stay at his residence and here the de-
fibrinated blood was placed on ice, while the bat was domiciled in the
garage. That night some of the blood was measured out in a flat dish. The
amount would have filled a fair-sized wine-glass. The bat hung head down-
ward from the top of its cage when the dish was placed inside and would
not come down to drink while we were there. Early the next morning we
inspected the cage and found the dish nearly empty.

That routine never varied during the 10 days' voyage to New York, with
stops at Colombian ports. We never saw the bat drink the blood, but in
the quiet of the night she took her meal. At the Park the senior author
decided to keep the vampire in the reptile house where the temperature
was automatically maintained and the atmosphere was damp, like a green-
house. In roomy quarters she quickly settled down. Blood was defibrinated
in the Park's research laboratory and the dish was never placed in the cage
until dark. For several weeks, however, despite cautious inspections with a
flashlight, no observations of her visits to the dish could be made, although
at some time during the night the blood was consumed.

At last the vampire became tame enough to show a lively interest when
the dish was placed in the cage. She would crawl down the mesh side a
few steps, peer at the dish, then creep back to her favorite nook in a corner,
where she would hang head downward, by one leg. Each night she came
further down and wandered along the sides of the cage before retreating.
Her deliberate motions were surprising: A slow stalk, head downward,
and a retreat equally deliberate. Her subsequent actions added much to
\nformation gleaned from the history of the species.
When the blood had been set in the cage, the observer took his stand in

THE VAMPIRE BAT 419

what developed into a series of nightly vigils. Finally there came a night
when the bat descended the side of the cage with her usual deliberation.
Reaching the bottom, she started across the floor with wings so compactly
held that they looked like slender forelimbs of a 4-footed animal. Her rear
limbs were directed downward. In this way her body was reared a full
two inches from the floor. She looked like a big spider and her slow gait
increased that effect. Her long thumbs were directed forward and outward,
serving as feet. Anyone not knowing what she was would have been un-
likely to suspect her of being a bat. In this trip to the dish it appeared that
an unpublished habit of the vampire had been observed, and this, pos-
sibly, was the method the bat used for prowling over a sleeping victim in
seeking a spot to use the highly perfected teeth in starting a flow of blood.

But other revelations were in store. Bending over the dish, the bat darted
her tongue into the sanguineous meal. Her lips were never near the blood.
The tongue was relatively long. It moved at the rate of about four darts a
second. At the instant of protrusion it was pinkish, but once in action it
functioned so perfectly that a pulsating ribbon of blood spanned the gap
between the surface of the fluid and the creature's lips. In 20 minutes noth-
ing remained but a red ring at the bottom of the dish. The bat's body was
so distended that it appeared spherical. She backed off from the dish, ap-
peared to squat, then leap, and her wings spread like a flash. She left the
floor and in a flying movement too quick for the eye to follow hooked a
hind claw overhead and hung, head down, in her usual position of rest.
Gorged and inverted, she preened herself like a cat, stopping occasionally
to peer out of the cage in the light of the single, shielded lamp to which
she had become accustomed.

Summarized, these observations appear to add much to the history of
Desmodus. In less than half an hour it had been demonstrated that the
vampire can assume a walking gait as agile as a 4-legged animal; that the
reason for its long thumb is its use as a foot on the wing stalk; that it is
not a blood-sucking creature as has long been alleged; that it can gorge
itself prodigiously and assume an inverted position to digest its meal.

The problem of recording these actions on motion picture film was at
once considered. The outlook was doubtful. If the vampire had been hesi-
tant about performing up to that evening in the illumination of a single,
shielded light, it appeared that lights of enough actinic power for photog-
raphy, yet tolerable upon the bat, would necessitate a slow introduction
and increasing the strength of the lamps. The observer's plan was to build
up the illumination, night after night, through a resistance coil, or dimmer.

Two weeks were spent in gradually increasing the strength of the light.
Ultimately the bat tolerated three 500 watt bulbs, with a reflector. The

420 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

scenes were exposed on 35 mm pancromatic film. The lens employed was
a 4-inch Zeiss, with long light-cone. Results were clear and satisfactory.

Since contentions as to new habits, based upon a single specimen, are
far more satisfactory if they are afterward substantiated by observations o£
additional individuals, it was determined that field observations should be
continued and additional vampires obtained during the summer of 1934.
Meanwhile the junior author started a search of the literature for observa-
tions other than the mere statement that the vampire is a blood-sucking
animal. . , .

Charles Darwin appears to have been the first scientist to observe a vam-
pire in the act of drawing blood and note its procedure with satisfactory
clarity. He secured a bat and definitely recorded the sanguineous habits
of Desmodus. Previous to this, several larger species of bats had been under
suspicion. Darwin's (1890) observation, however, did not change the belief
that Desmodus was a blood-sucking type. Nor could anything to the con-
trary be found in comparatively recent writing until the publication of an
article by Dr. Dunn (1932) containing the following:

The vampire does not suck blood, as popularly believed, but takes it up
with its tongue, seldom placing its mouth on the wound except when the lat-
ter is first made or when the bleeding is very slow. If the wound bleeds freely,
the bat simply laps up the blood, hardly touching the tissues, while if the
bleeding is scant the bat licks the wound.

Thus Dunn's observation, but a few years past, takes precedence, as far
as could be found, in rectifying a long procession of erroneous inferences
about the feeding habits of the vampire.

In further elucidation is a letter from Dr. Clark, dated April 18, 1934,
and reading in part:

Our vampire does not suck the blood. It uses its tongue to collect the blood,
in a back and forth motion, rather than as a dog or cat laps up water and
milk. I have seen them feed from the edge of cuts on horses, but, of course,
never got close enough under these conditions to see the tongue in action.
Animal feedings offered the bats under laboratory conditions establish the
fact that they lick the blood.

As to the quadrupedal gait of the vampire, apparently the first mention
of it is in the works of the Rev. J. G. Wood (1869), who states that vam-
pires can walk, rather than grovel like other bats, but the description is
insufficient in indicating the habit.

Dr. William Beebe (1925), in his book outlining experiences in British
Guiana, states :

THE VAMPIRE BAT 421

We ascertained, however, that there was no truth in the belief that they
(vampires) hovered or kept fanning with their wings * * *. Now and
then a small body touched the sheet for an instant, then, with a soft little tap,
a vampire alighted on my chest.

Slowly it crept forward, but I hardly felt the pushing of the feet and pull-
ing of the thumbs as it crawled along. If I had been asleep, I should not have
awakened.

Dr. Beebe's observation, though made in the dark, is good substantia-
tion of the senior author's surmise about the soft gait of the bat in recon-
noitering its prey. Dr. Beebe's description of the pushing of the feet and
pulling with the thumbs does not however, define the actual action of the
vampire, which walks, with body well elevated from the ground and the
elongated thumbs used as feet.

In further substantiation of the observation that the bat has a walking
gait, the senior author was informed by Sacha Siemel, an explorer of the
Brazilian jungle, that while he was conducting a party close to the Bolivian
frontier, a number of vampires attacked the horses. Mr. Siemel, with a
flashlight, carefully noted the actions of the bats. Some he saw lapping
blood from fresh wounds, while others, as yet undecided upon areas to
bite, stalked back and forth over the animals' backs, walked among the
matted leaves of the forest floor, or hopped from one spot to another.

OBSERVATIONS DURING 1934

For the tropical reconnoiter of this year, the senior author planned a trip
along the entire chain of the West Indies, terminating at its southerly end
in collecting work in Trinidad and British Guiana. The junior author left
a month ahead, on July 19, bearing a letter which put him in contact in
Trinidad with Prof. F. W. Urich of the Imperial College of Tropical
Agriculture. Professor Urich he found engaged in an investigation, oper-
ating on a government grant, of the transmission of paralytic rabies by
vampire bats. . . . Several days after arrival in Trinidad the junior author,
accompanied by William Bridges, captured seven vampire bats in the
Diego Martin Cave.

The newly captured bats were taken to the Government stock farm and
placed in a small framework building with sides of wire screen. In this
building was another vampire that had been under the observation of Pro-
fessor Urich for about 3 months. He had studied its feeding habits on goats
and fowls. This bat was tame enough to come down and feed while ob-
servers stood quietly in the room. Notes made by Professor Urich during
the studies by himself and his field assistant appeared in the monthly re-

422 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

ports of the Board of Agriculture of Trinidad and Tobago. From these,
Professor Urich granted permission to quote as follows :

May report. (Observation on May 19, 1934.) When I got there at 9:40
p. m., found the bat feeding on the left foot of the cock, about i inch below
the spur. The bat does not suck the blood, but laps it. Bat fed for 12 minutes
from the time I arrived, the cock standing absolutely still. Then the cock
started to walk, the bat following along the ground, and fed again. The cock
became restless and walked away. Then it went into a corner of the cage, on
the ground. [Observation by Wehekind.]

June report. (Observation on June 27, 1934.) Bat started feeding at 8:30
p. m. and finished at 8:40 p. m., being so gorged that he could scarcely fly.
Bat dropped straight on goat and started to feed. No hovering. [Observation
by Wehekind.]

In a later report.

As the Desmodus fed readily in captivity on fowls or goats, Mr. Wehekind
was able to ascertain the method of feeding of these bats on fowls. It is quite
different as stated in some records, the principal features of which are that the
bat does not hover around its victims, does not suck blood, and does a fair
amount of walking around on the victim to secure a suitable place for feed-
ing. This is carried out by making a narrow groove in the place selected and
lapping up the blood as it exudes from the wound. The bat always returns to
an old wound on the same animal on its daily feeding. All these observa-
tions were verified by me (F. W. Urich) on several occasions.

The junior author of the present review adds the following notes from
observations made in the screened house where the bats were quartered:

On Friday, August 3, 1934, at 6 p. m., Prof. F. W. Urich and myself went
to the Government stock farm to see the condition of the captive vampire
bats. One male vampire has been under Professor Urich' s observation since
May 1 8. It is known as "Tommy." When we caught seven additional vam-
pires, Tommy was placed in a cage by himself, as it was known that he was
free from paralytic rabies. Professor Urich then attempted to feed Tommy
with defibrinated blood. The bat was used to feeding upon goats and
fowls that were introduced into the cage and evidently did not relish the
diet of prepared blood in a small dish. It seems to have taken a small quan-
tity, but we thought it best to release it with the others after the necessary
quarantine.

At the time we entered the bat cage we found that a goat had been placed
inside for the other vampires to feed on. The goat had been freshly bitten, as
I noted three open wounds, two on the left side of the neck and one on the
right, from which blood was oozing.

THE VAMPIRE BAT 423

The goat was calm, standing in one corner and no bats were feeding when
we entered. Tommy was released from his quarantine quarters, flew and
attached himself by the hind foot on the screening of the house, about a foot
and a half from the sill. The goat was standing not far away from the vam-
pire. The bat remained hanging for about 5 minutes, the thumbs bracing
the body, the wings folded close to the arms. After a short interval, the bat
showed signs of movement. The head nodded; the lips were drawn back, ex-
posing the large canines and protruding incisor teeth. The bat's gaze finally
rested upon the goat. I was watching approximately 4 feet away from the
bat and the goat was nearer to me. Slowly the bat moved down the screen, a
deliberate stalk. The fore and hind feet were lifted high from the wiring and
the body was well above the mesh. The bat stalked down and I noticed that
the movement of the forearm in the stride was exceptionally slow, the wings
folded tightly. From 2 to 3 minutes were required to traverse the distance
from the original position to the sill. Upon arriving at the edge of the sill,
the vampire hung from its hind feet and dangled over the edge into space.
There, it remained for about 2 more minutes. The goat was still standing in
the same position. Suddenly and silently the vampire launched itself into the
air and lightly landed on the middle portion of the goat's back. There was
still no movement on the part of the goat. I moved quietly forward until I
was but 2 feet from the goat. Tommy stalked to the shoulder and neck re-
gions of the animal. After a minute or so of searching, the bat buried its head
close to the skin of the goat. There were a few up and down motions of the
bat's head (the act of pushing aside the pelage and of biting). The goat then
took a few steps forward and turned its head to the right and left. The bat
drew itself up but continued the nodding motions. The goat walked around
the room rather rapidly, the vampire hanging on and thus riding its host.
The goat passed by me, then stopped, and I noticed that blood was exuding
from a small wound and the bat was lapping it with a rapid darting of the
tongue. The goat started to walk again and passed under a sort of table, a
board of which brushed heavily against the animal's back. The goat was, in
fact, obliged to slightly lower itself to pass under. The vampire quickly scut-
tled down the shoulder of the goat to avoid being brushed off. When the
goat cleared the table the bat as quickly returned to the wound and continued
lapping. We then forced the goat to go back under the table several times,
the bat dextrously avoiding being hit by dodging down the shoulder. The
movement was very agile and reminded me somewhat of the behavior of a
crab. The bat could move both forward, backward, and sideways, but seem-
ingly preferred head first.

I then reached out my hand and succeeded in touching the vampire, which
attempted to dodge. It did not, however, make any movement to fly. The
goat by now was exceptionally restless and ran back and forth around the
room. It was a timid animal and it was of us that it was afraid. When we
left, the bat was still riding the goat.

424 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

Later visits to the enclosure showed some of the other bats flying down
from the ceiling, landing on "all fours" upon the floor, then hopping like
toads from one spot to another, instead of assuming the walking gait. On
one occasion a bat was seen to be so gorged and heavy from its sanguineous
meal that it slid off the back of a goat to the floor. It was unable to launch
itself in flight from the floor, hence climbed the wall, with head inverted,
and when midway up launched itself in flight, returning to its customary
hanging place on a ceiling beam.

When the senior author arrived in Trinidad, he spent considerable time
observing the bats during the early evening, in the screened room. His
notes on feeding actions would be nothing more than repetition of what
has already been brought out. What he noted particularly was the gen-
eral tolerance of the goat to bats which crawled over its back or even
wandered up the neck to the head. For a time after alighting on a goat,
the vampire was not inclined to bite, but rested on the dorsal area, a bit
forward of the shoulder, or clung to the side, where it looked like a big
spider. The wandering of the bat upon the strangely tolerant host, the
occasional lifting of the bat's head, the leer that disclosed its keen teeth,
and the observer's realization that all of this pointed to a sanguineous
meal, produced a sinister and impressive effect.

When the wound had been made, the tongue of the bat seemed to move
slower than when lapping blood from a dish, and was extended far enough
to come well in contact with the tissue. Goats of the laboratory herd, which
had been previously bitten while heavily haired, showed bare spots sur-
rounding the area of former wounds. The wounds themselves had healed
as a slightly indicated ridge, from three-sixteenths to a quarter of an inch
in length, but the area devoid of hair was as large as, or larger than, one's
thumbnail. Apparently the hair had been shed in the area of the wound.
Here may be a condition of "desensitization" in a vampire bite, with attend-
ing destruction of hair follicles. It has been suggested, though not with
satisfactory evidence, that the saliva of the bat contains an anticoagulant,
which might account for many bites bleeding for several hours. The term
"desensitization," as here used, may be rather a loose one, but it signifies
that something abnormal has happened to the tissue besides the opening
of a mere wound by specialized and lancing incisor teeth. There can cer-
tainly be no injection of an anticoagulant, but there is a possibility of the
application of some salivary secretion during the action of the bat's lap-
ping tongue — a secretion retarding the formation of a clot about the
wound.

Field observations in Trinidad indicated vampire bats to be fairly com-
mon, but not generally distributed. Near the base of the Aripo heights,

THE VAMPIRE BAT 425

particularly, frequent bites were reported. The bats attacked cattle, swine,
and poultry. Sows were bitten upon the teats and the wounds in healing
so shriveled these members that the animals were unable to nurse their
young. Most fowls were unable to survive the loss of blood and were
found dead in the morning.

Around a dish of defibrinated blood, the feeding motions of the four
vampires brought back from Trinidad duplicated the notes made upon
the Panama specimen of the preceding year, though the latter represented
a different subspecies. The animals so gorge themselves that their bodies
become almost spherical. This gorging consumes from 20 to 25 minutes.

In some experiments with large fowls, weighing up to 8 pounds, the
bats were observed to be extremely cautious in their approach, slowly stalk-
ing in a circle wide enough to keep out of reach of the bird's bill. An
action of that kind might readily kill a light-bodied bat. After several
circular maneuvers, an approach was made to the fowl's feet, the bat feel-
ing its way forward inch by inch, and finally nibbling gently at the under
surface of the toe. This appeared to serve the purpose of getting the fowl
accustomed to its toe being touched. If the fowl made an abrupt move,
the bat would dart backward, then slowly stalk forward to resume its at-
tack. Whether any slight "shaving" of the tissue was taking place and a
salivary secretion was being applied by the tongue it was impossible to
determine, as the bats were too timid to bear extremely close inspection.
After these preliminaries, however, the mouth was rather slowly opened
as if to gauge precisely the sweep of the incisor teeth, and then there was a
quick and positive bite. While it has been customary to allege the utter
painlessness of vampire bites, in several instances where fowls were under
observation, there was a decided reaction of motion on the birds' part,
showing that the bite was sharply felt. If the fowl moved, the bat darted
back, but immediately returned to the wound, now freely bleeding. From
this point the bat continued its meal and the fowl paid no further atten-
tion to it.

. . . Experiences of reliable observers point to a remarkable painlessness
of the average vampire bite. There are statements that victims knew noth-
ing of the attack, and would have remained ignorant of such a happen-
ing had they not found blood stains the following morning. An expedition
from the University of Michigan in Santa Marta, Colombia, may be cited
(Ruthven, 1922) :

. . . We had been raided during the night by vampire bats, and the whole
party was covered with blood stains from the many bites of these bats. It may
seem unreasonable to the uninitiated that we could have been thus bitten and

426 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

not be disturbed in our sleep but the fact is that there is no pain produced at
the time of the bite, nor indeed for some hours afterward.

In a previous paragraph it has been noted that a fowl, introduced into a
cage with vampires, flinched upon being bitten, this observation being
made by the senior author. Examining some of the recent studies of Dunn,
it appears that the younger bats are not so expert in effecting their bites
and that experimenters testing the bites of various specimens upon the
human forearm occasionally found bats that dealt decidedly painful bices.

'955

Ancestors

GUSTAV ECKSTEIN

FIRST MORNING OF MY VISIT TO THE STATION A
doctor took me on his rounds— not from room to room but from
cage to cage. We started at the Maternity Building. One mother was a
giantess. A hundred and seventy-five pounds she weighed. Mona was her
name. Next her was another who, the doctor said, might give birth as
early as to-morrow. The third never had had a baby, yet waited with a
quiet as if she had had a hundred. Suddenly Mona shuffled foward to
the chain-link netting, chewed thoughtfully at a straw, and her infant
that lay low against her abdomen dug its scrawny feet into her groin and
its thin fingers caught at the hair at either side of her breast. That infant
had the oldest face I think I ever saw.

The birth of an ape — the process does not seem like the birth of a calf
or a kitten, but more like that of a child, the female period long like ours,
the gestation long like ours, the creature that comes forth almost the
wrinkly thing that we see in our obstetrical wards. It is light brown to
black, pink-palmed, pink-soled. There is of course none of our excitement,
no family in a dither, no waiting pacing father. It all goes more unor>

ANCESTORS 427

trusively, more swiftly. A blunt laboratory record reads : "At 3 130 p.m. the
outcries of an infant in a cage adjoining Cuba's attracted attention, and
the newborn Peter was discovered."

This Maternity Building is one of a neat group that make up the
southern division of the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology. The
buildings began to spring up in 1930, on a spot that had been sand and
disorderly sub-tropical foliage, a mile from Orange Park, fifteen miles
from Jacksonville. The hollow tile and stucco were bought with Rocke-
feller money, wisely spent, but the dream, the patience, the energy were
Robert Mearns Yerkes', world-known animal psychologist. Northern
Florida was chosen because it would be healthful, fairly warm for the
apes and not too hot for the scientists, far enough into the country not
to have every passerby drop in, and close enough to a city to have supplies
near at hand and a railroad that ran you as promptly as possible back to
New York or to the parent laboratories in New Haven. The purchase
was two hundred acres, only eight of them fenced in, Mrs. Yerkes herself
overseeing the gardening, so that to-day these anthropoid experimental
laboratories are a place where it is pleasant to live and stimulating to
work. The purpose of the Station is to breed the chimpanzee, study it,
mind and body, make both the records and the bred animals available for
a great range of investigations not only at Yale but everywhere in the
country.

The Station's firstborn was a female. They called her Alpha. Her
mother, Dwina, died of childbed fever. Thus the director had an orphan
on his hands. He called into consultation a pediatrician, who made out
a diet list used for human infants. They were to start Alpha on water,
corn syrup, evaporated milk, lemon juice. At the fourth month cooked
cereals were to be added, at the sixth month pureed vegetables, at the
twelfth, banana and Chimcracker, this last with ground bone baked in.
In all her earliest performances Alpha was just a little faster than the
human infant, otherwise much the same, called impatiently for her food,
played with her bottle when it was empty, sucked her thumb when there
was not enough. She weighed 4.97 pounds at birth, lost up to the sixth day,
regained her original weight by the fifteenth, doubled her weight by the
ninetieth, tripled it by the one hundred and eighty-second. In short, she
was an all-round model baby.

We left the Maternity Building. We crossed a grassy court to the
Nursery. We approached its first cage. Two were plastered against the
inside like two bats and a third was swinging on the ceiling. They were
Ami, four years old, Cap, two years, Dan, a year. The doctor opened the
cage. Ami threw her arms around his neck. He carried her off, weighed

428 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

her (all nursery inmates are weighed every day of their first year),
brought her back. Cap was weighed, brought back. But while Dan was
on the scales the doctor stopped to talk with me, told me of some experi-
ments that the scientists are performing on the chimpanzee mind. They
are producing neuroses, with the hope that something may be learned
from the chimpanzee concerning insanity in man. This talk lasted only
about five minutes, but the two left in the cage were in a fury when the
doctor returned. They scolded him, welcomed Dan, overdid the wel-
come, walked arm in arm with him, dramatized everything, treated
him as if he had been off for seven months to the South Seas.

We went on to the next cage. This next one's name was Ben. He looked
me over. I was wearing a white silk suit. He waited till he had me at the
right distance, then between his two front teeth shot a stream of water
that caught me head to foot. He kept back a little and let me have that
later. Six years old. Born clown. I went into his cage. He threw himself
down on to the floor, rolled at full length, lumpy as a sack of potatoes.
Suddenly out of the roll he hurled his forty pounds against me, and
when he saw that I staggered he made insulting noises with his mouth.
He should be sold to a circus. Later I heard his family history, and it
was one to warm the heart of a social worker. "Mother, Pati, a bad health
risk, relatively inactive, not trustworthy. Father, Pan, heavy, apathetic,
of a low intelligence." There was a slum child, unmistakably.

In a building to the left on the second floor is the beginning of an
Experimental Nursery. All were taken from their mothers at birth. All
will be kept two or three years. All will be exposed to a minimum of
childhood infections. All will be washed in a tub. All will wear diapers.
I once saw a chimpanzee baby in diapers, and a shock of pain it gave me
for that little foreigner so far from its own country.

Orang-utan, chimpanzee, gorilla, those are the great apes. Below them
in scale are the Old World monkeys and the New World monkeys.
Below those are the tarsiers and the lemurs. Put man at the head of the
list, and you have them, the primates. They are mammals, nursed by their
mothers and come from their mothers, not from eggs. You can see the
whole primate parade in any good-sized zoo.

Man has an unsatisfiable curiosity in man. He digs up fossil man. He
pries into the races of himself, the black, the brown, the yellow, the white.
He believes that beyond fossil man and beyond the great apes, a million
years ago, chere was once a form, lost now, with more both of ape and
man than any form we know, from which both sprang. The ape branch

ANCESTORS 429

changed comparatively little in that million years, the man branch com-
paratively much.

Now what you can learn from fossil man is limited, and when you
try to study living man his prides get in the way, so the chimpanzee is an
increasingly valuable piece of living material. Many things can be learned
from it. Many practical human problems can be attacked through it,
problems of disease, of the uses of drugs, problems of inheritance, even
of social behavior. The records at the Station already go from finger-
prints to intelligence quotients. Yet if you are not a specialist, if you are
just visiting at Orange Park, watching what goes on in the cages, you
find yourself soon becoming a bit contemplative and philosophical.

Could these really be your ancestors ? When you are at home with your
friends you can feel lighthearted about an objectionable relative, but if the
relative drops in on you, and especially if he looks a bit like you, it is
another story. In other words, face to face with a gallery of chimpanzees,
all ages, thirty-two living portraits, you are bound to ask yourself: "Can
these after all be that close to me in the line of man's descent?" You
know the arguments. You have decided one way or another. But with
the opportunity in front of you you cannot resist a somewhat unscientific
search for evidence. I myself even imagined I saw signs of those great
steps by which we are thought to have arrived where we are. I mention
three, (i) The Rise to the Erect Posture. (2) The Free Use of Hands.
(3) Speech.

On the second day of my visit I was standing by the Enclosure — a
space run round with a 14-foot fence, part galvanized chain-link netting,
part steel plate. The Enclosure was a test project. There was to be a much
larger one if it worked. Grass and trees were to be planted, a family of
chimpanzees to be let in, and to be studied as in its native haunts. The
Enclosure was made ready. The chimpanzees were let in. Promptly they
removed leaves, branches, bushes, stripped the little jungle. So there was
left the space. A shelter was built in the middle of it, and two mature
ones, Pan and Josie, were established out there, might stay out all winter,
develop fine furs.

It was late afternoon when I was standing by the Enclosure. The buz-
zards were floating blackly in the Florida sky, a carcass somewhere below.
I began picturing to myself the African brush, a chimpanzee trail, a
chimpanzee nest, four or ten together, a leader, all for the moment munch-
ing at some edible roots. Then, from the shack, Pan leaned out his head
and shoulders. He saw me. Noiselessly he dropped to the grass,

430 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

approached me by that shifty walk that goes forward by going left and
right, reached the chain-link netting, lifted his humanoid head from
between his shoulders, and, slowly, solemnly, significantly, rose from four
feet to two, rose to the erect posture, rose through half a million years
of history, and, as if to emphasize what he had done, lifted high his right
arm and rested his hand against the chain-link. Back in the shelter, Josie,
thinking perhaps that her old man was getting into trouble, now also
leaned out, saw me, noiselessly dropped to the grass, came forward by
the same shifty walk, reached the chain-link netting, slowly, solemnly,
significantly, rose from four feet to two, lifted high her right arm and
rested her hand against the chain-link. Male and Female. They might
have been Adam and Eve.

I had by now got my eyes so full of chimpanzee that when a man
passed me I realized that I had seen him pass me on his two hind feet.

Pan and Josie would not have found it comfortable long to stand that
way. They would not have found it comfortable to walk that way. That
little silent scene was only a preview ages in advance, and the interpreta-
tion only me amusing myself. Yet when the anthropologist explains to
us how he thinks the thing actually did take place you can get the impres-
sion that he is amusing himself too.

There were trees over Asia, and the apes swung in the branches, and
that was their mode of locomotion. Then the Himalayan mountains
pushed up out of the earth. The land to the south continued treed, and
the apes continued to swing in the branches. But the land to the north
was barren, and the apes there went mostly on all fours. However, one
ape tried to go on two, tried hard enough and long enough, and therefore,
if you take the Lamarckian point of view, finally was able to do it, and
had the satisfaction of looking out over all the others. Or, one ape was
just able to do it, was born that way, and having that advantage was
selected, if you take the Darwinian point of view, anyway also had the
satisfaction of looking out over all the others. What that ape did not know
was that it possessed the beginning of the domination of the earth.

For there was something of more importance in this than the mere
satisfaction. There \vas something more valuable even than the erect
posture. That ape henceforth had its two hands free.

Freedom of the hands, and from that shortly the use of tools, and from
that by stages the world that a man knows — a place where he could begin
henceforth magnificently to create and appallingly to destroy.

Each chimpanzee apartment at Orange Park consists of a cage partly

ANCESTORS 431

roofed, and behind it a small living room. Thus a chimpanzee can be out-
of-doors in the sun, out-of-doors in the shade, or if he is chilly can go
back into his room which is artificially heated and crawl into his box
to sleep. A heavy gravity door divides cage from room. Every chimpanzee
is able to operate his gravity door, even to slam it if he is in a temper,
or to throw it open and give a cold to the whole dormitory, or jam his
arm between if man attempts to shut it from the outside, and otherwise
so neatly to control it that not once in the ten years of the Station's history
has a chimpanzee baby got caught by its hand or foot. Now, to operate
a gravity door is a very simple thing to do, but — it is the use of a tool.

When Doctor Yerkes laid out these apartments he needed to get drink-
ing water into them. He considered fountains with plungers. He was
advised against this, nevertheless trusted his chimpanzees, sank the
drinking fountains into the concrete. Then the big day came. The first
chimpanzee pushed his plunger, had his drink, and the knowledge ran
like fire through dry wood. Every chimpanzee pushed his plunger, had his
drink. To push a plunger is a very simple thing to do, but — it is the use of
a tool.

In the psychological experiments that are the chief work at the Station
chimpanzees turn knobs, press electric buttons — have an air of doing this
only for a serious purpose, like a man sounding the horn of his car when
traffic gives him an excuse, but with the same secret joy that no observant
eye misses. They also pull ropes, stack boxes, fit pegs into holes, and so
on. Yet these hands that are on many occasions so capable may on others
be as wild and purposeless.

Wendy is a middle-aged female. Wendy had got hold of a piece of iron
pipe. How she got hold of it nobody knew, but it must be taken away
from her. The way you do that is trade for a banana. So you may have
a scientist on one side of the chain-link, a chimpanzee on the other, bar-
gaining—give me the pipe, I'll give you the banana. This with Wendy
was a long affair. Several times she seemed ready to make the trade, but
each time withdrew the pipe again, suddenly waxed angry, seized the
scientist's hand, sank her teeth into a finger, the flesh tearing out along
the bone as he pulled away. He drew his revolver. She rushed at him in
a rage. He fired the blank cartridge straight at her. A neighboring chim-
panzee fled off in terror. Wendy merely carried the pipe to the back of
her cage and glowered from there. Eventually the pipe was taken away,
had to be, for sooner or later intelligent Wendy might begin in a most
unintelligent manner to beat, beat, beat, in a few hours might hammer
through the concrete floor of her cage, beat, beat, beat, without purpose
to her, without purpose to anyone, reminding you of some of the actions

432 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

of our own insane, beat, beat, beat, no more purpose in the machine, but
the machine chugs on.

In the twilight I saw Wendy squatting in the shadow of her door. She
Was like a sculpture of Rodin. Lifted in front of her were her hands.
She seemed bored. The hands were there, Wendy was there, but the full
rich nervous connections between the hands and Wendy were not yet
there. So Wendy waited. You could hardly say she waited impatiently,
for no one can wait impatiently through several hundred thousand years,
nevertheless with some look of eternal expectance in her face — waited on
those hands to establish further connection with that brain, when stone
implements would rise, then bronze, then a Stuka bomber or the iron
gates of Benvenuto Cellini.

The brain of a small chimpanzee will weigh as little as 300 grams. The
brain of a large gorilla as much as 650 grams. The brain of the lowest
fossil man, Pithecanthropus erectus, less than 1000 grams. Our brains, the
human male brain, 1300 to 1500 grams. The brain of the Neanderthal
man, 1700 grams. The brain of Ivan Turgenev, 2100 grams. So the chim-
panzee brain is at one extreme with 300 grams, the brain of the great
Russian at the other with 2100 grams, yet the smaller is in many respects
an almost exact replica of the larger. The chimpanzee's is lacking espe-
cially in that part that gives to us our noble brow. There is doubtless less
of that area of brain with which we do the more intelligent acts of our
hands. And there is definitely an almost entire absence of that other man-
cherished area — the area of speech.

I was brought to a consideration of speech one morning when I stepped
out of the Administration Building. I heard a mewing. I knew the voice.
Bokar's. A fine male. I reached his cage. He tipped the top of his head
toward me, wanted me to scratch his pate. I did. Abruptly he tipped the
top of his head away from me, I should give some attention under his
chinless jaw. I did. He pushed one hand through the chain-link netting.
I subjected the top of two of his fingers to the most exquisite tactile
stimulation— both of us thought that. The next moment, however, the
lower reflex animal in him got the better of him, and he clutched my
hand, and, having clutched it, his dignity forbade him to return it, so,
by way of keeping everything pleasant between us, he presented me his
sensitive abdomen. I did. All of this was accompanied by tones, many
modulations, very intimate, very friendly, almost amorous. Speech. Private
conversation.

Suddenlv he backed off to the middle of the cage. He smacked his lips.

ANCESTORS 433

He clapped his hands. He shaped a fist. A heavy automobile tire was
suspended by a chain from the ceiling. He sent the tire up there with a
boom. He liked that. He drove it up again. He leapt forward, grabbed
hold of his cage, shook it till you knew why everything down there is
anchored in concrete, at the same time spoke, uh, uh, uh, uh, his pursed
lips belching like a gun mouth. She in the cage beyond pounded with her
bare feet. He in the cage beyond hers pounded with his bare hands. Then
in a faraway cage someone smothered all this noise in one high scream
that was taken up on every side till the whole Station reverberated. It was
that extension of zoo that is Africa. Social conversation.

Doctor Yerkes once tried to teach a chimpanzee to speak. The results
are published in a small interesting book. A hole was cut into the wall
of the observing room, a chute made to lead from the hole for pieces of
banana, the observer placing himself by the hole, dropping in a piece
and repeating a syllable, ba, ba, ba, ba, and doing this day after day.
Other devices, other syllables, but the chimpanzee did not learn to speak.
The chimpanzee has a vocal apparatus like ours, but cannot be made to
imitate us in tones. The experiment was reversed. A worker with a good
ear went among the chimpanzees, wrote out on music paper the notes,
rests, rhythms, that accompanied actions, food, persons. The conclusion
drawn was that, though the chimpanzee does not speak in our sense, it
does have a meager substitute, a limited vocabulary.

Think what speech has done for man. It has given him the earth.
Report of a small invention in Chicago is printed in a Tokyo newspaper,
in that way it becomes added to a small invention made in Tokyo, to
another made in London, to another in Rome, and an airplane in conse-
quence is accelerated fifty miles an hour. On Thursday last a discovery
is completed in the Rockefeller Institute, is telephoned to Shanghai, and
on the following Tuesday in consequence a life is saved in China. And
though a chimpanzee in a moonlit lane may have some definitely moonlit
feelings, at least it cannot transmit them next day at noon to someone
who was not there, in a radiogram. One suspects, further, that since a
chimpanzee mother in her inexperience may crush her infant, and since
down the whole biological line mothers may destroy their young when
it is not convenient to sustain them, the human mother also might kill
more often than she does except for tutorage. And man's monopoly on
tutorage he owes to speech. That is, moral quality also comes out o£
speech. Without speech no religion. Without speech no philosophy. No
science. No art. No Shakespeare. No voting. No daily newspaper. No
stock market quotation. No propaganda. No war. To be sure, a day may
come when man will go back into silence again and be no less great on

434 THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE

that account, think more, bear his own company better, settle his problems
more honestly and more wisely. Feelings in such a man might stay with
him longer than ours do with us, not so quickly escape in sound.

It was my last night at Orange Park. Doctor and Mrs. Yerkes were
driving me after supper from their house toward the laboratories. The
road goes in and out of a corridor of Spanish moss pinned up on the
branches of the water oaks. There was a half moon, a mystic light. We
arrived outside the fence that surrounds the eight acres. In there they
slept.

Toward five o'clock that afternoon I had stood in front of a cage. One
came out of her door. She looked at me. Possibly she wanted me to go
away. I stayed. She lay down on her back on the floor. She looked at me.
I stayed. She drew both her knees up on to her belly, as I have done with
my own knees in my own bed. She looked at me. Would I not have the
good breeding to go away? I stayed. She put one hand up under her
head, and her disgust with me now was plain, turned away her face,
soon snored.

In there they slept. Some on their left sides, some on their right, some
on their backs, some on their bellies.

If they were to escape?

They would be shot, Doctor Yerkes quickly assured me. The young
ones, Ami, Cap, Dan, people might think them monkeys and not shoot
them. But Pan with his low intelligence, and Bokar with his sensitive
abdomen, and Wendy the shrew, they would be shot. People would flee
from them in terror — but also in outrage — these living testimonials to
their own source, these antique breathing fossils, that they should presume
to walk abroad among men.

1940

C. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

Darwinisms

DARWIN s FATHER:

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and will be
a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

T. H. HUXLEY ON "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" I

"It is doubtful if any single book, except the Trincipia,' ever worked so
great and so rapid a revolution in science, or made so deep an impression
on the general mind."

DARWIN:

"I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things
which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My indus-
try has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and
collection of facts."

"Accuracy is the soul of Natural History. It is hard to become accurate;
he who modifies a hair's breadth will never be accurate. . . . Absolute ac-
curacy is the hardest merit to attain, and the highest merit."

"Facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much
thinking."

"I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any
hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on
every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it."

"If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated
so much the better."

"I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that
whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me,
which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it
without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and
thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable
ones."

435

436 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

"I am very poorly to-day, and very stupid, and hate everybody and every-
thing. One lives only to make blunders."

"I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of
undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who
are very clever — much cleverer than the discoverers — never originate any-
thing. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching
for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs."

"... I think I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in
the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker,
who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do
not mean to say that a favorable review or a large sale of my books did not
please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, $nd I am sure that
I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame."

"I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be
proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand."

"It is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf
for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science,
though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest,
which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach."

"I do not believe any man in England naturally writes so vile a style as
I do."

"Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have
tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it
nauseated me."

"What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful
blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!"

Darwin and "The Origin of Species'

SIR ARTHUR KEITH

WHEN H.M.S. BEAGLE, "OF 235 TONS, RIGGED AS A
barque, and carrying six guns," slipped from her moorings in
Devonport harbour on 27 December, 1831, the events which were to end
in the writing of "The Origin of Species" were being set in train. She had
on board Charles Darwin, a young Cambridge graduate, son of a wealthy
physician of Shrewsbury, in the role of naturalist. On the last day of
February 1832 the Beagle reached South America and Darwin, just entered
on his twenty-fourth year, stepped ashore on a continent which was
destined to raise serious but secret doubts in his mind concerning the
origin of living things. He was not a naturalist who was content merely to
collect specimens, to note habits, to chart distributions, or to write accurate
descriptions of what he found; he never could restrain his mind from
searching into the reason of things. Questions were ever rising in his
mind. Why should those giant fossil animals he dug from recent geological
strata be so near akin to the little armour-plated armadillos which he
found still alive in the same place? Why was it, as he passed from district
to district, he found that one species was replaced by another near akin
to it? Did every species of animal and plant remain just as it was created,
as was believed by every respectable man known to him ? Or, did each and
all of them change, as some greatly daring sceptics had alleged ?

In due course, after surveying many uncharted coasts, the Beagle reached
the Galapagos Islands, five hundred miles to the west of South America.
Here his doubts became strengthened and his belief in orthodoxy shaken.
Why was it that in those islands living things should be not exactly the
same as in South America but yet so closely alike? And why should each
of the islands have its own peculiar creations? Special creation could not
explain such things. South America thus proved to be a second University
to Charles Darwin; after three and a half years spent in its laboratories
he graduated as the greatest naturalist of the nineteenth century. It had

437

438 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

taken him even longer to obtain an ordinary pass degree from the Uni-
versity of Cambridge.

The first stage in the preparation of The Origin of Species thus lies in
South America. The second belongs to London. The Beagle having cir-
cumnavigated the world returned to England in October 1836, and by his
twenty-ninth birthday, 12 February, 1837, Darwin was ensconced in
London with his papers round him working hard at his Journal and
Reports, but at the same time determined to resolve those illicit doubts
which had been raised by his observations in South America and which
still haunted him, concerning the manner in which species and animals
had come into the world. He knew he was treading on dangerous ground;
for an Englishman to doubt the truth of the Biblical record in the year
1837 was to risk becoming a social outcast; but, for Darwin, to run away
from truth was to be condemned by a tender conscience as a moral coward.
He was a sensitive man, reflective, quiet, warm-hearted, ever heeding the
susceptibilities of his friends. Added to this he was also intensely modest
and as intensely honest, fearing above all things even the semblance of a
lie in thought or in act. The facts he had observed in South America
merely raised his suspicions. They suggested to him that animals and
plants might become, in the course of time, so changed as to form new
species. At first they were but suspicions, but as he proceeded to collect
evidence in London, the suspicions deepened. More particularly was this
the case when he inquired into the methods employed by breeders to
produce new varieties of pigeons, fowls, dogs, cattle and horses. He soon
realised that for the creation of new domestic breeds two factors were
necessary — first there must be a breeder or selector, and secondly the
animals experimented on must have in them a tendency to vary in a
desired direction. Given those two factors, a new breed, having all the
external appearances of a new species, could be produced at will.

Having satisfied himself on this point, he turned again to animals and
plants living in a state of nature and found that they too tended to vary.
"But where," he had to ask himself, "is Nature's selector or breeder?" At
this juncture he happened to read an Essay written by the Rev. T. R.
Malthus, first published in 1798, On the Principle of Population) and as he
read, realised that the breeder he was in search of did exist in Nature. It
took the form, he perceived, of a self-acting mechanism — a mechanism of
selection. Among the individuals of every species, there goes on, as
Malthus had realised, a competition or struggle for the means of life, and
Nature selects the individuals which vary in the most successful direction.
The idea that living things had been evolved had been held by many men
before Darwin-came on the scene; it was already well known that animals

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" 439

tended to vary in form and in habit, but the realisation that Nature had set
up in the world of living things an automatic breeder, which utilised
variations as a means of progress, was entirely Darwin's discovery.

And thus it came about that during his second year in London (1838)
and before he had completed the thirtieth of his life, Darwin had wrested
from Nature one of her deepest secrets — a secret which gave him a clue to
one of her many unsolved mysteries. Great ideas, if they are to come at all,
usually come before a man is thirty and it was so in Darwin's case. In
South America he had merely had doubts about the orthodox belief; the
revelation which came in London convinced him that the real story of
creation was quite different from the one usually told and accepted. With
the discovery of the law of Natural Selection in 1838 The Origin of Species
entered its second stage of preparation, and it is convenient to regard this
stage as ending in January 1839, when Darwin married his cousin Emma
Wedgwood.

The third stage opened in September 1842, when he resolved to find
peace for study and for health by removing his family from London to
Down in the chalky uplands of Kent, where he lived until his death on
14 April, 1882. He had inherited money and resolved to devote his life to
the solution of the old problem of creation, instead, as is so often the case
with men of his class, to leisure and to sport. On his arrival at Down he
believed he was in possession of a secret of momentous import — and so
unholy that he determined to say nothing of it until he had attained com-
plete certainty. He had at that time many researches in hand and, as he
worked at them, he was ever on the outlook for evidence to prove the
truth or untruth of his theory. We know that, just before he left London,
he had permitted himself the luxury of seeing what his theory looked like
when reduced to paper; that sketch, written in June 1842, is really the first
outline of The Origin of Species, but it then filled only thirty-five pages of
manuscript. It was not until 1844, when he had been two years at Down,
and had amassed much additional evidence, that he committed to writing
a complete exposition of his theory; this time he succeeded in filling 230
pages of manuscript. This third stage — the stage of accumulating evidence
— continued with many intermissions until 1854, when the preparation of
The Origin of Species entered its fourth stage.

In 1854 he completed his research on Barnacles — a seven years' task, and
was thus free to set in systematic order the immense amount of evidence
he had accumulated — all of it bearing upon the problem of transmutation
or evolution of every form of life. This he now proceeded to do, but there
were many interruptions. From time to time, while busy with many in-
quiries and experiments and sadly hindered by indifferent health, a chap-

440 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

tcr of his projected work was written and as his self-imposed task pro-
ceeded it became apparent to him it was to be a big book — three volumes
at least. And so he went along until the summer of 1858 was reached, when
on a day early in June the rural postman pushed into his letter-box a mis-
sive which gave him the shock of his life and brought his projected book
to a sudden end. The postmark showed that the missive had been dis-
patched from an address in the Celebes Islands. In this sudden manner
we pass from the fourth to the fifth and final stage in the preparation of
The Origin of Species.

In the history of Science there is no episode so dramatic as that which
compelled Charles Darwin to pass so abruptly to the fifth and final stage
in the preparation of The Origin of Species. He was no longer a young
man; he was in his fiftieth year. Let us look for a moment at the staging
of this drama and the actors who took part in it. In February 1858, when
Darwin, in his study at Down, was suffering from his "accursed stomach"
and struggling painfully with his proofs of transmutation, another Eng-
lishman, Alfred Russel Wallace, was lying in the small island of Ternate,
in the Malay Archipelago, suffering from bouts of malarial fever, and
puzzling over the same problem as engaged Darwin's attention at Down.
The writer has experienced these bouts of ague and knows how vivid is
the imagery that then races through the brain and how nimbly the mind
hunts along a train of ideas. Such a bout brought Wallace his revelation.
He was fourteen years Darwin's junior. He was also a poor man, being
dependent for a livelihood on the collections he made as a travelling
naturalist. He, too, had visited South America just as Darwin had, and it
was while collecting on the Amazon that he became impressed by the
tendency of animals and plants to vary. Soon after his arrival in Borneo
he had read, just as Darwin had done eighteen years before him, Malthus's
Essay on Population. He had, before then, begun to suspect that species
were not immutable, and as his brain raced along during his attack of
fever in Ternate it stumbled across the idea which came to Darwin in
London—the idea that the struggle would favour those individuals which
tended to vary in an advantageous direction and that such individuals
might continue to change until a new species was brought into existence.
As soon as the attack of fever was over and his temperature had returned
to normal he began to write, and at one sitting finished an account of his
discovery — an idea which would explain the origin of new species without
calling in the aid of any supernatural agency whatsoever. Having written
his sketch, he thereupon addressed it to a man who was almost a stranger
to him — Charles Darwin Esq., F.R.S., Down House, Down, Kent, where
it duly arrived in the third week of June 1858.

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" 441

On opening this missive Darwin found that the fears of his best
friends, Sir Charles Lyell and Dr. Joseph Hooker of Kew Gardens, had
come only too true; he had been forestalled. By a curious stroke of fate,
the favourite child of his brain, which he had nursed and tended in secret
for over twenty years, was suddenly deprived of that which is so dear
to the heart of a father — the birthright of priority. Wallace's sketch, he
found, was almost a replica of the one he himself had penned after his
arrival at Down; and how much had he discovered and added to the
original sketch in the intervening years! Darwin knew that if he acted
rationally, and he was as nearly rational as men are made, he ought to
welcome Wallace's communication. It was a confirmation of his own con-
clusions. He was ashamed to find himself troubled at heart over this paltry
matter of priority. It is a long way from Kent to the land of Moriah and
from Darwin's day to that of Abraham, but distant as are the places and
the times, they are linked together by the same human nature. Abraham
with his knife and bundle of faggots was resolved to make the supreme
sacrifice and so was Darwin, and he would have done it had not his
friends Lyell and Hooker intervened. They exercised a judgment worthy
of Solomon; justice was to be done to both authors by a conjoint com-
munication to a learned society. They asked Darwin to supply them with a
brief abstract of his theory and this, with Wallace's sketch, they sent to
the Linnean Society of London. The two papers were read at a meeting
held on i July, 1858, and caused no great commotion.

This communication having been made, Lyell and Hooker insisted
that Darwin must now prepare for publication, and he then began to work
on The Origin of Species as we now know it. He set himself to abstract
and to condense what he had already written. The opening chapters were
finished in September 1858 but it took him fully twelve months of toil
and tribulation before he could write finis. On 24 November, 1859, the
book was published and thus ended the fifth stage in the preparation of
The Origin of Species.

The publishers apparently did not expect a big demand for The Origin;
at least they printed only 1250 copies. A second edition was called for in
1860 — one of 3000 copies. A third appeared in 1861, a fourth in 1866, a
fifth in 1869 and a sixth and final edition in 1872. Darwin lived for ten
years after the issue of the sixth edition, but so thoroughly had he win-
nowed his data, so fully had he met the expert criticism of his time, that
he did not feel called upon to make any further alteration in its text.

Such is a brief account of how The Origin of Species came to be written.
Its preparation occupied, from first to last, a period of forty years, for its
foundation was being laid in 1832 when Darwin began his researches ip

442 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

South America, and its building was not finished until the last edition
appeared in 1872. The book came into being during a period when
Europe was in a state of intense intellectual activity, and the effect it
produced was immediate and profound. The generation which felt its first
shock is dying or dead. The generation which has grown up, like every
new generation, is passing the household gods inherited from its prede-
cessor through the fiery furnace of criticism. How is The Origin of Species
to emerge from this ordeal? Having served its day and generation is it
now dead? Or does it possess, within itself, the seeds of eternal youth and
is it thus destined to become one of the world's perpetual possessions?
The latter, I am convinced, is its destiny. On the foundations laid by
Darwin in this book his successors have erected a huge superstructure
which will be infinitely extended and modified as time goes on. Yet I feel
certain that as long as men and women desire to know something of the
world into which they have been born, they will return, generation after
generation, to drink the waters of evolutionary truth at the fountain-head.

The Origin of Species is still freely abused and often misrepresented, just
as it was when Darwin was alive. In his final edition he entered a mild
protest — a luxury he rarely indulged in — against a misrepresentation to
which his theory was persistently subjected. "But as my conclusions have
lately been much misrepresented," he wrote, "and it has been stated that I
attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may
be permitted to remark, that in the first edition of this work, and sub-
sequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position — namely, at the close
of the Introduction — the following words: / am convinced that natural
selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification.
This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation,
but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does- not long
endure."

The power of error to persist is more enduring than Darwin thought;
the misrepresentation of which he complained is being made now more
blatantly than ever before. It is being proclaimed from the housetops that
The Origin of Species contained only one new idea, and that this idea, the
conception of natural selection, is false. Natural selection, some of his
modern critics declare, is powerless to produce new forms of either plant
or animal. Darwin never said it could. In his book the reader will find him
giving warning after warning that by itself selection can do nothing. To
effect an evolutionary change two sets of factors, he declared, must be at
work together — those which bring about variations or modifications in
animal or in plant and those which favour and select the individuals
which vary or become modified in a certain direction. Why should so

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" 443

many critics continue to misunderstand the essentials of Darwin's theory
of evolution?

Men do not wilfully persist in misrepresentation; there must be some
explanation of their error. The truth is that Darwin himself was at fault;
the full title he gave to his book was The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection. Plainly such a title was a misnomer, his book was and
is much more than such a title implies; it was much more than a mere
demonstration of the action of natural selection, it was the first complete
demonstration that the law of evolution holds true for every form of living
thing. It was this book which first convinced the world of thoughtful men
and women that the law of evolution is true. Long before Darwin's time
men had proclaimed the doctrine of evolution, but they failed to convince
their fellows of its truth, both because their evidence was insufficient and
because they had to leave so much that was unexplained. Darwin, on the
other hand, brought forward such an immense array of facts in this book
and set them in such a logical sequence that his argument proved irre-
sistible. He never resorted to any kind of special pleading, but permitted
facts to speak for themselves. However longingly his readers clung to age-
\ong beliefs. Darwin compelled them to face facts and draw conclu-
sions, often at enmity with their predilections. We all desire to be intellec-
tually honest, and sooner or later truth wins. It was this book which won
a victory for evolution, so far as that victory has now been won. When it
appeared in the nineteenth century the Why and the How of evolution
were immaterial issues. What had to be done then was to convince men
that evolution represented a mode of thinking worthy of acceptation
and in that The Origin of Species succeeded beyond all expectation. Nor
has it finished its appointed mission. No book has yet appeared that can
replace it; The Origin of Species is still the book which contains the most
complete demonstration that the law of evolution is true.

This, then, is Darwin's essential service to the world — not that he dis-
covered the law of Natural Selection — but that he succeeded in effecting
a complete revolution in the outlook of mankind on all living things. He
wrought this revolution through The Origin of Species. Darwin himself
formed a true estimate of what the nature of this revolution was. In the
last paragraph of his Introduction, he writes, "Although much remains
obscure and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the
most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable,
that the view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which
I formerly entertained — namely , that each species has been independently
created — is erroneous. I am firmly convinced that species are not immu-
table." From this statement we see that Darwin's aim was to replace a
belief in special creation by a belief in evolution and in this he did succeed,

444 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

as every modern biologist will readily admit. No one was in a better posi.
tion to measure what Darwin succeeded in doing than his magnanimous
contemporary and ally Alfred Russel Wallace. Writing to Professor New-
ton of Cambridge in 1887, five years after Darwin's death, he penned the
following passage: "I had the idea of working it out [the theory of natural
selection], so far as I was able, when I returned home, not at all expecting
that Darwin had so long anticipated me. I can truly say now, as I said
many years ago, that I am glad it was so, for I have not the love of work,
experiment and detail that was so preeminent in Darwin and without
which anything I could have written would never have convinced the
world" Darwin succeeded in convincing the world not only by his super-
abundance of proof but by the transparently honest way in which he pre-
sented his case. No one can read The Origin of Species without feeling
that Darwin had the interests of only one party at heart — his client, Truth.
Darwin succeeded in convincing scientific men that the law of evolu-
tion is true of all living things and yet the manner in which evolution
takes place — the machinery of evolution, described in his book — may be
totally wrong. If this were really so, The Origin of Species would be alto-
gether out of date. Some critics have insinuated as much. — But was Darwin
wrong in his conception of the mode of evolution ? . . . The machinery in-
volved— is it out of date? My deliberate opinion is that the machinery of
evolution described in his work is not out of date and never will be.
Darwin perceived that two factors are concerned in evolution — one is
"productive," the other is "selective." The productive factor gives rise to
the materials of evolution — the points or characters wherein one individual
differs from another — whether that individual be a plant or a human
being. Such differences Darwin names "variations." How are such varia-
tions produced? In every chapter of his book the reader will find Darwin
declaring that he does not know; the only point of which he felt certain
was that individual differences do not arise by chance. He was of opinion
that food, climate, and habit are concerned in the production of variations,
but he also realised that there were other causes of variation inherent in the
living tissues of plants and animals. Every year we are coming to know
more and more concerning the production of variations; we begin to see
that development and growth are regulated by an extremely complicated
series of interacting processes. When we have come to a full knowledge
of these processes and can explain how "variations" are produced, will
The Origin of Species then pass out of date? It will not, because Darwin
made full allowance for the ignorance of his time and for future knowl-
edge; what we discover now and what our successors will find out about
the production of "variations" serves and will serve to add fuel to the
fire kindled by Darwin; further discoveries cannot extinguish that fire.

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" 445

Our knowledge of the laws of heredity increases rapidly; Darwin expected
such an increase and made allowance for it. He knew nothing of Mendel
but he exemplifies the law now known by Mendel's name. However much
our knowledge of heredity may progress, Darwin's position, as established
in this book, will be but strengthened.

Thus we may regard the "productive" factor of Darwin's theory of
evolution as fully established, but what of his "selective" factor? It has
been often assailed, and many critics believe they have demolished it. Let
readers judge for themselves. Let them watch the flock of sparrows which
year after year frequents their gardens and note the dangers to which its
members are exposed, and draw their own conclusion as to the "survival
of the fittest." Or let them read the travels of observant naturalists, and
judge whether or not a struggle is a condition of all living things in a
state of nature. The law is said not to hold true in the world of mankind.
We may do our best to debrutalise and to humanise the struggle, but
competition prevails. Even Trades Unions compete with one another for
increase of membership. One business house unites with other business
houses so that the combination may compete the more successfully with all
rivals. There is competition between nations and between human races.
We increase our knowledge not merely for the glory of knowing, but
that we may compete the more successfully. No one who views mankind
with unprejudiced eyes can say that Darwin's law of selection is out of
date. There is competition and struggle throughout the whole of Nature's
realm. Nor do I think it can ever pass out of date in any form of human
society unless man deliberately resolves to give up the struggle of life. As
to what will happen in such a case the law of evolution leaves us in no
doubt. The species which gives up the struggle becomes extinct. The revo-
lution in outlook, effected by this book, was not confined to men who study
the history of animals and of plants. Its conquest gradually spread until
every department of knowledge was affected. No matter what a man's
line of study might be — the stars, the earth, the elements, industry, eco-
nomics, civilisation, theology or man himself — the inquirer soon began to
realise that he must take the law of evolution as his guide. It was Darwin
who changed the outlook of all gatherers of knowledge and made them
realise that behind the field of their immediate inquiry lay an immense
evolutionary or historical background which had to be explored before
further progress was possible. Nay, it was Darwin who made men see that
evolution is now everywhere at work — in all things material, moral and
spiritual, and will continue in operation, so far as the human mind can
anticipate, to the very end of time.

7928

Gregor Mendel and His Work

HUGO ILTIS

IT IS 120 YEARS SINCE, IN A SMALL VILLAGE ON THE
northern border of what was called Austria at that time, a boy was born
in a farmer's house who was destined to influence human thoughts and
science. Germans, Czechs and Poles had been settled side by side in this
part of the country, quarreling sometimes, but mixing their blood contin-
ually. During the Middle Ages the Mongolic Tatars invaded Europe just
there. Thus, the place had been a melting pot of nations and races and,
like America, had brought up finally a splendid alloy. The father's name
was Anton Mendel; the boy was christened Johann. He grew up like other
farmers' boys; he liked to help his father with his fruit trees and bees and
retained from these early experiences his fondness for gardening and bee-
keeping until his last years. Since his parents, although not poor compared
with the neighbors, had no liquid resources, the young and gifted boy had
to fight his way through high school and junior college (Gymnasium).
Finally he came to the conclusion, as he wrote in his autobiography, "That
it had become impossible for him to continue such strenuous exertions. It
was incumbent on him to enter a profession in which he would be spared
perpetual anxiety about a means of livelihood. His private circumstances
determined his choice of profession." So he entered as a novice the rich
and beautiful monastery of the Augustinians of Bruenn in 1843 and as-
sumed the monastic name of Gregor. Here he found the necessary means,
leisure and good company. Here during the period from 1843 to 1865 he
grew to become the great investigator whose name is known to every
schoolboy to-day.

On a clear cold evening in February, 1865, several men were walking
through the streets of Bruenn towards the modern school, a big building
still new. One of those men, stocky and rather corpulent, friendly of coun-
tenance, with a high forehead and piercing blue eyes, wearing a tall hat, a
long black coat and trousers tucked in top boots, was carrying a manu-
script under his arm. This was Pater Gregor Mendel, a professor at the

446

GREGOR MENDEL AND HIS WORK 447

modern school, and with his friends he was going to a meeting of the So-
ciety of Natural Science where he was to read a paper on "Experiments in
Plant Hybridization." In the schoolroom, where the meeting was to be
held, about forty persons had gathered, many of them able or even out-
standing scientists. For about one hour Mendel read from his manuscript
an account of the results of his experiments in hybridization of the edible
pea, which had occupied him during the preceding eight years.

Mendel's predecessors failed in their experiments on heredity because
they directed their attention to the behavior of the type of the species or
races as a whole, instead of contenting themselves with one or two clear-
cut characters. The new thing about Mendel's method was that he had
confined himself to studying the effects of hybridization upon single par-
ticular characters, and that he didn't take, as his predecessors had done,
only a summary view upon a whole generation of hybrids, but examined
each individual plant separately.

The experiments, the laws derived from these experiments, and the
splendid explanation given to them by Mendel are to-day not only the base
of the modern science of genetics, but belong to the fundamentals of biol-
ogy taught to millions of students in all parts of the world.

Mendel had been since 1843 one of the brethren of the beautiful and
wealthy, monastery of the Augustinians of Bruenn, at that time in Aus-
tria, later in Czechoslovakia. His profession left him sufficient time, and
the large garden of the monastery provided space enough, for his plant
hybridizations. During the eight years from 1856 to 1864, he observed with
a rare patience and perseverance more than 10,000 specimens.

In hybridization the pollen from the male plant is dusted on the pistils
of the female plant through which it fertilizes the ovules. Both the pollen
and the ovules in the pistils carry hereditary characters which may be
alike in the two parents or partly or entirely different. The peas used by
Mendel for hybridization differed in the simplest case only by one char-
acter or, better still, by a pair of characters; for instance, by the color of
the flowers, which was red on one parental plant and white on the other;
or by the shape of the seeds, which were smooth in one case and wrinkled
in the other; or by the color of the cotyledons, which were yellow in one
pea and green in the other, etc. Mendel's experiments show in all cases
the result that all individuals of the first generation of hybrids, the F i
generation as it is called to-day, are uniform in appearance, and that more-
over only one of the two parental characters, the stronger or the dominant
one, is shown. That means, for instance, that the red color of the flowers,
the smooth shape of the seeds or the yellow color of the cotyledons is in
evidence while the other, or recessive, character seems to have disappeared.

448 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

From the behavior of the hybrids of the F i generation, Mendel derived
the first of the experimental laws, the so-called "Law of Uniformity,"
which is that all individuals of the first hybrid generation are equal or
uniform. The special kind of inheritance shown by the prevalence of the
dominant characters in the first hybrid generation is called alternative in-
heritance or the pea type of inheritance. In other instances, however, the
hybrids show a mixture of the parental characteristics. Thus, crossing be-
tween a red-flowered and a white-flowered four o'clock (Mirabilis) gives a
pink-flowered F i generation. This type of inheritance is called the inter-
mediate, or Mirabilis, type of inheritance.

Now, Mendel self -fertilized the hybrids of the first generation, dusting
the pistils of the flowers with their own pollen and obtained thus the sec-
ond, or F 2 generation of hybrids. In this generation the recessive charac-
ters, which had seemingly disappeared, but, which were really only cov-
ered in the F i generation, reappeared again and in a characteristic and
constant proportion. Among the F 2 hybrids he found three red-flowered
plants and one white-flowered plant, or three smooth-seeded and one-
wrinkled-seeded plant, or three plants with yellow cotyledons and one with
green ones. In general, the hybrids of the F 2 generation showed a ratio of
three dominant to one recessive plants. Mendel derived from the behavior
of the F 2 generation his second experimental law, the so-called, "Law of
Segregation." Of course, the characteristic ratio of three dominant to one
recessive may be expected only if the numbers of individuals are large, the
Mendelian laws being so-called statistical laws or laws valid for large num-
bers only.

The third important experimental law Mendel discovered by crossing
two plants which distinguished themselves not only by one but by two or
more pairs of hereditary characters. He crossed, for instance, a pea plant
with smooth and yellow seeds with another having green and wrinkled
seeds. The first, or F i, generation of hybrids was of course uniform, show-
ing both smooth and yellow seeds, the dominant characters. F i hybrids
were then self-fertilized and the second hybrid, or p2, generation was
yielded in large numbers, showing all possible combinations of the pa-
rental characters in characteristic ratios and that there were nine smooth
yellow to three smooth green to three wrinkled yellow to one wrinkled
green. From these so-called polyhybrid crossings, Mendel derived the third
and last of his experimental laws, the "Law of Independent Assortment."
These experiments and observations Mendel reviewed in his lecture.
Mendel's hearers, who were personally attached to the lecturer as well as
appreciating him for his original observations in various fields of natural
science, listened with respect but also with astonishment to his account of

GREGOR MENDEL AND HIS WORK 449

the invariable numerical ratios among the hybrids, unheard of in those
days. Mendel concluded his first lecture and announced a second one at
the next month's meeting and promised he would give them the theory he
had elaborated in order to explain the behavior of the hybrids.

There was a goodly audience, once more, at the next month's meeting.
It must be admitted, however, that the attention of most of the hearers was
inclined to wander when the lecturer became engaged in a rather difficult
algebraical deduction. And probably not a soul among the audience really
understood what Mendel was driving at. His main idea was that the liv-
ing individual might be regarded as composed of distinct hereditary, char-
acters, which are transmitted by distinct invisible hereditary factors — to-day
we call them genes. In the hybrid the different parental genes are com-
bined. But when the sex cells of the hybrids are formed the two parental
genes separate again, remaining quite unchanged and pure, each sex cell
containing only one of the two genes of one pair. We call this fundamental
theoretical law the "Law of the Purity of the Gametes." Through com-
bination of the different kinds of sex cells, which are produced by the
hybrid, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment
can be easily explained.

Just as the chemist thinks of the most complicated compound as being
built from a, relatively small number of invariable atoms, so Mendel re-
garded the species as a mosaic of genes, the atoms of living organisms. It
was no more nor less than an atomistic theory of the organic world which
was developed before the astonished audience. The minutes of the meet-
ing inform us that there were neither questions nor discussions. The
audience dispersed and ceased to think about the matter — Mendel was
disappointed but not discouraged. In all his modesty he knew that by his
discoveries a new way into the unknown realm of science had been opened.
"My time will come," he said to his friend Niessl.

Mendel's paper was published in the proceedings of the society for 1866.
Mendel sent the separate prints to Carl Naegeli in Munich, one of the out-
standing biologists of those days, who occupied himself with experiments
on plant hybridization. A correspondence developed and letters and views
were exchanged between the two men. But even Naegeli didn't appre-
ciate the importance of Mendel's discovery. In not one of his books or
papers dealing with heredity did he even mention Mendel's name. So, the
man and the work were forgotten.

When Mendel died in 1884, hundreds of mourners, his pupils, who re-
membered their beloved teacher, and the poor, to whom he had been
always kind, attended the funeral. But although hundreds realized that
they had lost a good friend, and other hundreds attended the funeral of

450 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

a high dignitary, not a single one of those present recognized that a great
scientist and investigator had passed away.

The story of the rediscovery and the sudden resurrection of Mendel's
work is a thrilling one. By a peculiar, but by no means an accidental,
coincidence three investigators, in three different places in Europe, DeVries
in Amsterdam, Correns in Germany, Tschermak in Vienna, came almost
at the same time across Mendel's paper and recognized at once its great
importance.

Now the time had arrived for understanding, now "his time had come"
and to an extent far beyond anything of which Mendel had dreamed. The
little essay, published in the great volume of the Bruenn Society, has given
stimulus to all branches of biology. The progress of research since the be-
ginning of the century has built for Mendel a monument more durable
and more imposing than any monument of marble, because not only has
"Mendelism" become the name of a whole vast province of investigation,
but all living creatures which follow "Mendelian" laws in the hereditary
transmission of their characters are said to "Mendelize."

As illustrations, I will explain the practical consequences of Mendelian
research by two examples only. The Swede, Nilsson-Ehle, was one of the
first investigators who tried to use Mendelistic methods to improve agri-
cultural plants. In the cold climate of Sweden some wheat varieties, like
the English square-hood wheat, were yielding well but were frozen easily.
Other varieties, like the Swedish country wheat, were winter-hard but
brought only a poor harvest. Nilsson-Ehle knew that in accordance with
the Mendelian Law of Independent Assortment, the breeder is able to
combine the desired characters of two different parents, like the chemist
who combines the atoms to form various molecules or compounds. He
crossed the late-ripening, well-yielding, square-hood wheat with the early-
ripening, winter-hard, but poor-yielding Swedish country wheat. The re-
sulting F i generation, however, was very discouraging. It was uniform, in
accordance with Mendel's first law, all individuals being late-ripe and
poor-yielding, thus combining the two undesirable dominant characters.
In pre-Mendelian times the breeder would have been discouraged and
probably would have discontinued his efforts. Not so Nilsson-Ehle, who
knew that the F i generation is hybrid, showing only the dominant traits,
and that the independent assortment of all characters will appear only in
the F 2 generation. Self-fertilizing the F i plants he obtained an F 2 gen-
eration showing the ratio of nine late-ripe poor-yielding to three late-ripe
well-yielding, to three early-ripe poor-yielding, to one early-ripe, well-yield-
ing wheat plants. The desired combination of the two recessive characters,
early-ripe, well-yielding, appeared only in the smallest ratio, one in sixteen

GREGOR MENDEL AND HIS WORK 451

— but because recessives are always true-breeding, or as it is called "homo-
zygote," Nilsson-Ehle had only to isolate these plants and to destroy all
others in order to obtain a new true breeding early-ripe and well-yielding
variety which after a few years gave a crop large enough to be sold. Thus,
by the work of the Mendelist, Nilsson-Ehle, culture of wheat was made
possible even in the northern parts of Sweden and large amounts hereto-
fore spent for imported wheat could be saved.

Another instance shows the importance of Mendelism for the under-
standing of human inheritance. Very soon after the rediscovery of Men-
del's paper it became evident that the laws found by Mendel with his peas
are valid also for animals and for human beings. Of course, the study of
the laws of human heredity is limited and rendered more difficult by sev-
eral obstacles. We can't make experiments with human beings. The laws
of Mendel are statistical laws based upon large numbers of offspring, while
the number of children in human families is generally small. But in spite
of these difficulties it was found very soon that human characters are inher-
ited in the same manner as the characters of the pea. We know, for in-
stance, that the dark color of the iris of the eye is dominant, the light blue
color recessive. I remember a tragi-comic accident connected with this
fact. At one of my lecture tours in a small town in Czechoslovakia, I
spoke about the heredity of eye color in men and concluded that, while
two dark-eyed parents may be hybrids in regard to eye color and thus may
have children both with dark and blue eyes, the character blue-eyed, being
recessive, is always pure. Hence two blue-eyed parents will have only blue-
eyed children. A few months later I learned that a divorce had taken
place in that small town. I was surprised and resolved to be very careful
even with scientifically proved statements in the future.

Even more important is the Mendelian analysis of hereditary diseases.
If we learn that the predisposition to a certain disease is inherited through
a dominant gene, as diabetes, for instance, then we know that all persons
carrying the gene will be sick. In this case all carriers can be easily recog-
nized. In the case of recessive diseases, feeblemindedness, for instance, we
know that the recessive gene may be covered by the dominant gene for
health and that the person, seemingly healthy, may carry the disease and
transmit it to his children.

With every year the influence of Mendel's modest work became more
widespread. The theoretical explanation given by Mendel was based upon
the hypothesis of a mechanism for the distribution and combination of
the genes. To-day we know that exactly such a mechanism, as was seen by
the prophetic eye of Mendel, exists in the chromosome apparatus of the
nucleus of the cells. The development of research on chromosomes, from

452 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

the observations of the chromosomes and their distribution by mitosis to
the discovery of the reduction of the number of chromosomes in building
the sex cells and finally to the audacious attempt to locate the single genes
within the chromosomes, is all a story, exciting as a novel and at the same
time one of the most grandiose chapters in the history of science. A tiny
animal, the fruit-fly, Drosophila, was found to be the best object for ge-
netical research. The parallelism between the behavior of the chromosomes
and the mechanism of Mendelian inheritance was studied by hundreds of
scientists, who were trying to determine even the location of the different
genes within the different chromosomes and who started to devise so-called
chromosome maps. . . .

From 1905 to 1910, 1 tried by lectures and by articles to renew the mem-
ory of Mendel in my home country and to explain the importance of Men-
delism to the people. This was not always an easy task. Once I happened
to be standing beside two old citizens of Bruenn, who were chatting before
a picture of Mendel in a book-seller 's window. "Who is that chap, Mendel,
they are always talking about now?" asked one of them. "Don't you
know?" replied the second. "It's the fellow who left the town of Bruenn
an inheritance!" In the brain of the worthy man the term "heredity" had
no meaning, but he understood well enough the sense of an inheritance
or bequest.

*943

The Courtship of Animals

JULIAN HUXLEY

From Man Stands Alone

WE MEN LIKE TO SEE ANIMALS COURTING. IT AMUSES
us to see them thus imitating humanity, and throws something at
once romantic and familiar into those dumb and hidden lives which
they veil so closely from us. "One touch of Nature makes the whole world
kin," we murmur, and find a new pleasure in the hackneyed words. They
are really not quite apropos, however; for what we in our heart of hearts
mean to say is one touch of human nature. Man is a vain organism, and
likes to stand surrounded by mirrors — magnifying mirrors if it be possible,
but at any rate mirrors. And so we read the ideas of our own mind into
the animals, and confidently speak of "suitors" and "coy brides to be won"
and "jealous rivals" and what not, as if birds or even spiders or newts
were miniature human beings, in fancy dress no doubt, but with the
thoughts of a twentieth-century inhabitant of London or New York.

Some of the more reflective, perhaps, may wonder how far we are
justified in our assumptions as to the motives and meaning of animal
courtship; while others, with maybe some biological knowledge behind
them, may try to look at it all from the other side of the gulf between
man and beast, imagine how our own courtship would look to an external
and dispassionate intelligence, wonder whether much of human behaviour
had better not be interpreted from the animal side rather than the
animal's from ours, and how much we are walled in by our biological
heritage.

Animal courtship is an unfashionable topic among biologists at present;
and I do not exaggerate when I say that it is also one on which both
ignorance and prejudice prevail. My own real interest in the subject began
when, one spring in Wales, I observed the beautiful courtship of the
redshank, a common shore bird, and when I got back to libraries, could
find no ordered account of it, or indeed of bird courtship in general. And

454 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

now, after some twenty-five years of reading and thinking about the
subject, interspersed with a number of pleasant if strenuous holidays in
Britain, in Louisiana, in Holland, in Spitsbergen, trying to find out what
really does happen with this or that common bird, I can confidently
assert that Darwin's theory of sexual selection, though wrong in many
details, yet was essentially right: that there is no other explanation for
the bulk of the characters concerned with display, whether antics, song,
colour, or special plumes or other structures, than that they have been
evolved in relation to the mind of the opposite sex; that mind has thus
been the sieve through which variations in courtship characters must pass
if they are to survive.

Down at the base of the animal scale courtship of course does not exist.
Jelly-fish or sponges or sea-urchins simply shed their reproductive cells
into the water and trust to luck for fertilization. It is only when male and
female must actually co-operate for fertilization to be effected, that we
can expect to find courtship; and even so it will not exist unless there
is a fairly elaborate brain and nervous system.

Perhaps the first adumbration of courtship is seen in the nuptial dances
of certain marine bristle-worms (Polychaetes), in which at certain seasons
of the year and phases of the moon the creatures swim up out of their
crannies in the rocks and gather in groups, excited males wriggling round
the females. It is possible that the presence of the dancing males in some
way stimulates the females to lay their eggs, upon which the male
elements are discharged in milky clouds. Snails too have a primitive
courtship, which is complicated by the fact that they are bi-sexual and
each in its role of male attempts to stimulate the other in its role of female.
But the first actions to which the name courtship, and not merely
perhaps direct stimulus to fertilization, must be given are those of a few
crabs and most spiders. Among the crustaceans, the fiddler-crab is
characterized by the presence in the male of one enormously enlarged
claw, which may weigh almost as much as the rest of the body, and is
often brightly coloured. It used to be supposed that with this the males
stopped their burrows, or fought other males, or seized and carried off
the females. However, the careful studies of Dr. Pearce show that its
main function is one of display. In the mating season, when a female
comes past, the males throw themselves into a tiptoe attitude, with big
claw rigidly held aloft. If the female takes no notice, the male runs again
to where she can see him, and again strikes the statuesque pose: if she
goes too far, he returns to his burrow. The observer summed up his
impressions thus: "One could only say that the males appeared to be
displaying their maleness."

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS 455

There we have the clue to the origins of courtship in a nutshell. Once
the brain reaches a certain complexity, it controls behaviour. A crab can
react to various situations — a food-situation, a hunger-situation, a fear-
situation, a sex-situation; and the statuesque male with his uplifted claw
is the sign and symbol of the sex-situation, just as the coming of a man
or other large animal among the burrows constitutes an enemy-situation,
with resultant scuttling. Doubtless even without such male advertisement,
mating would eventually occur; but, as Darwin so clearly saw, the advan-
tage may be to the male and not to the race — the male who did not display
himself as such would not get mated and would leave no descendants.

In the spiders, we find a very interesting difference between the hunters
and the web-spinners. Among the former, who catch their prey by sight
and stalking, males perform strange dances before the females, and often
have the parts they thus display brightly coloured. The latter are almost
blind; and in them there are no dances, but the male comes up to the
web of the female and vibrates one of the threads in a special manner,
quite different from the vibrations made by trapped prey. In both cases
it seems clear that the courtship's primary function is to indicate the
existence of a "sexual situation." But here, to do so is a good deal more
important than in the crab, for all the evidence goes to show that if this
indication were not made, the female would simply treat the male like
any other small living object, and eat him! In many species she actually
does so after the act of mating (and this occurs too in the scorpions) ; and
in some others she is definitely hostile at first, while the male, who is
usually much smaller than she is, is always obviously very ready to run
away during the early phases of courtship.

In one hunting spider the male offers the female a nice fly, neatly
wrapped in silk. If put in a box by himself with a fly, he will eat it; but
if with a fly and a female, he will wrap and offer it; and if in a box from
which a female has recently been removed, and in which her odour still
presumably lingers, he will still wrap it, and search, like Shelley with his
bouquet, "That he might there present it! — Oh, to whom?"

In the carnivorous flies of the family Empidae, strange developments
of the love-gift have taken place. In some species the male offers an
unadorned carcass to the female. In others, however, the prey is stuck
in the front end of a glistening "balloon," made of bubbles of viscous
liquid secreted by the male, larger than his own body, and carried in his
legs as he flies to and fro; doubtless this makes the "sexual situation"
more conspicuous from afar. Finally, in a few species there has been a
refinement. The balloon is there, but prey is no longer carried in it;
instead, the males stick a leaf or flower-petal in it— and indeed they will

456 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

dart down and pick up any small conspicuous objects, such as fragments
of paper, that you may choose to sprinkle on the surface of the water
over which they hover. Here, in quite a different evolutionary line from
our own, we find quite definitely the employment of a non-utilitarian
"present" as gift from male to female.

When we come to the vertebrates, matters become even more interest-
ing, for it is among them, especially in the birds, that courtship and
display reach their highest elaboration. Only in a few fish is there much
of a courtship, as would be expected from the fact that most species
produce large numbers of eggs which are only fertilized after laying. The
frogs and toads that make night pulse with sound in the warm regions
of the earth use their voices, as do the grasshoppers their legs or wings,
in the interests of reproduction; and if the grasshoppers were life's first
instrumentalists, the frogs were the first vocalists.

The male frog, however, merely broadcasts an advertisement of his
presence; it is among the tailed amphibians that true display is found.
Our common newts in the breeding season take to the water and develop
a high fin all along the back and tail. This is much larger in the males,
who in addition change their winter livery for one of brighter colours.
They may also be seen performing their courtship — actively moving in
front of the females, often scraping up against them, all the time vibrating
the bent tail. The strange fact about this procedure, however, is that they
do not begin their display until after they have emitted their fertilizing
elements. These are deposited on the bottom of the pond or aquarium
inside a special packet or spermatophore, which the female must pick
up for fertilization to occur; and courtship begins when this deposition
is completed.

Here we see that display may have a racial function, adjuvant to suc-
cessful fertilization, and is not an affair between rival males. For even
the most hardened Darwinian would hardly maintain that a female, if
two males simultaneously deposited spermatophores and then began their
display before her, would be able to remember which male had deposited
which spermatophore even were she to be better pleased or more stimu-
lated by the display of one rather than of the other; and of course unless
the approved male were also to be the father of the young, his pleasing
of the female could have no evolutionary effect. No: it seems clear that
here the function of display has again to deal with the "sexual situation";
with the difference that it is not merely to advertise the male's presence
and masculinity, but to generate a sexual situation in the mind of the
female. As a matter of fact, Finkler has by experiment shown that in the
absence of a male's display, the female will not pick up spermatophores,

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS 457

so that this conception of courtship's function being to facilitate fertiliza-
tion via the mind, by stimulating the mental mechanism into the right
phase, seems justified.

There is one species of bird for which Darwin's original theory has
been definitely shown to hold good. That is the well-known shore bird,
the ruff (Machetes). In the winter the sexes are only to be told apart by
size, but in the breeding season the males grow a magnificent ruff — a
tippet or collar — round the cheeks and neck, and two fine ear-tufts above.
What is more, it is hard to find two males alike; not only do they develop
different ground-colours in their plumage, but the collar and ear-tufts
may either or both be of some special colour or marking, one black, the
other white; or chestnut, pepper and salt, buff, sandy, grey, sepia, and
what not. Arrived at their breeding places, the males assemble at a
definite spot, usually known as a "hill," though it may be but a dry area
in the marsh. The females visit the hill from time to time, but the males
never go near the nests out in the marshes, nor take any share in brooding
or the cares of the young. On the hill each male usually keeps to a little
private area of his own. When no females are present, the male birds will
be dancing, whirring round like Dervishes, and sparring and jousting
with each other. On the arrival of a female, the scene is changed. The
males crouch down, immobile, sometimes flat on the ground with spread
wings The hen may simply stroll round and fly away again — on which
the cock birds rise rather sheepishly from their prostrate posture, as if
pretending that nothing had been going on. Or she may approach a male
and nibble at his neck, on which mating will be consummated.

Edmund Selous watched one particular ruff hill in Holland for weeks,
arriving at his hide at or before dawn. Every male on the hill was distin-
guishable by his appearance; and so Selous was able to discover that some
were more successful than others.

Here is Darwin's theory in practice, working itself out in every detail —
the adornments developed only by the male in the breeding season, and
used only in sexual combat and sexual display; the male with no power
to enforce his desires, the female completely arbiter of her choice; and,
finally, the evidence that choice is exercised. The only puzzling point is
the extreme variability of the males. This may be explained by some
later discoveries. Various biologists, as we shall see later, have found that
display, combat, and threat have a direct physiological effect on birds of
both sexes, actually helping to ripen the reproductive organs. And Fraser
Darling and others have recently shown that this effect is cumulative,
some stimulus resulting from the sight of other birds courting or fighting.
This at once explains the frequent occurrence of communal display-

458 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

grounds; they are arrangements for heightening reproductive efficiency.
But it also explains the ruff's variability. If, as seems reasonable, the
unfamiliar is more exciting than the familiar, variety will have a greater
mass-stimulating effect than uniformity. So, granted a tendency to marked
variation, variety will be encouraged and preserved.

This clear-cut case is of importance, because it enables us to draw
pretty definite conclusions in other similar cases. In the blackcock, for
instance, a handsome member of the grouse tribe, there are similar assem-
bly-places for mating — veritable temples of Venus. Here the individual
males cannot be distinguished, but each again appears to have his own
definite pitch or stand, and, both from direct watching and by analogy
with the ruff, it seems that here, too, there is true selection. Finally in
some Birds of Paradise there are also mating-places, but in the trees,
where the males dance and display their gorgeous plumes.

It is interesting to note that the evolution of such special mating-places
with assemblies of males and visits by females has taken place at least
three separate times in birds — in the waders, the game-birds, and the
Birds of Paradise. The influence of mode of life on type of courtship is
another problem that can be followed out in birds. Where there is polyg-
amy and where the female alone broods the eggs and cares for the young,
there we find the greatest disparity in colour and courtship-behaviour
between the sexes. The female is generally drab, protectively coloured;
the male, per contra, brilliant, and alone participating in display. Since
there is polygamy (or promiscuity), the successful male will imprint his
characters on a larger number of descendants — and so display-brilliance
will be at a premium; while, since he plays no biologically useful role
after fertilization is once effected, there is less need for protective colour,
since it does not much matter whether he be killed or no.

Most birds are monogamous, however, at least for the season (or some-
times only for a single brood — like the American wren, which as bird-
banding experiments have shown, usually changes partners between the
first and second broods of a single year). Most of the largest group of
monogamous birds, the song-birds proper, have their whole sex-life hinge
on what we may call the territorial system. They have their young hatched
naked and helpless, needing abundant food for their growth, and liable
to die of cold if left too long unbrooded. Hence it is necessary, first, for
both parent birds to feed the young; second, for the presence round the
nest of an area sufficiently large to supply the young's needs, and not
trespassed upon by other food-seeking parents of the same species. This
is ensured through an extension of the instinct, nearly universal among

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS 459

birds, to resent intrusion into the area round the actual or future nest-
site.

Even in colonial nesters, like egrets or guillemots, the defended area
exists, though it may be only a couple of feet across. In what we may
call the true territorial birds, or birds with feeding as well as nesting
territory, the course of events is as follows (I follow in this particular
Eliot Howard's admirable description of the course of events in the
European warblers or Sylviidae). The males are first on the breeding-
grounds. If the species be a spring migrant, the males generally migrate
north a week or so ahead of the females. Arrived, they take possession
of an area — a territory — sometimes without dispute, sometimes after a
fight with a simultaneous arrival or a bird already in possession. Then they
begin their singing. Contrary to usual belief, the song of most song-birds
is at its best before the mate has even arrived. As Howard has I think
convincingly shown, the prime function of song is an advertisement. It is
an advertisement of eligibly-occupied territory, which serves the double
purpose of attracting females and warning off other males. Similarly,
many of the special display-characters of males are used in threat-display
against other males as well as in courtship-display to females.

When the females arrive on the scene, no immediate courtship on the
part of the males is to be observed. If the female is alone, she simply takes
her place in the territory, and the two are a pair for the season. Nature
abhors a vacuum, and this particular vacuum, the absence of the female
from a territory, is filled with the least possible fuss. If two rival females
arrive together, it is they who fight for the possession of territory-plus-
male, while he hovers about, an interested and even excited spectator, but
without participating. Then follows the strange fact, which at first sight
seems to upset the whole Darwinian apple-cart, namely that courtship and
display now begin vigorously — only now, after the two birds are mated
for the season. The male vibrates his wings, spreads his tail, puffs his
feathers, bows and scrapes, runs before his mate, often with a leaf or
twig or other piece of nest material in his beak, and his antics may be so
extravagant as to testify to the most ardent excitement within. How can
this be fitted in with Darwin's view that these antics and displays have
been evolved in large measure through the female's selection? To this,
what we have learned from the lowly newt provides the answer. Court-
ship and display need not always have as their chief result the choosing
of a mate. They may be, and indeed normally appear to be, accessory to
the act of pairing and fertilization itself. The mind of a bird is a complex
thing, and so is its life; the bird cannot always be tuned to a sexual
situation. The simplest way, it would appear, of ensuring that it is not

460 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

always so tuned (with consequent excessive pairing), and yet of ensuring
that both sexes shall be simultaneously ready to mate often enough, is
that one sex — the male — shall be more constantly in the phase of sexual
preparedness, and by his display shall both advertise the fact and also help
to stimulate the female to the proper emotional level.

Finally, as we have mentioned, there is a more direct biological advan-
tage in display. It appears that in seasons which have been inclement just
before and during egg-laying, the number of eggs is often reduced and
the percentage of infertility raised. It is also known that all the repro-
ductive processes of birds are very much under the control of the higher,
emotional centres of the brain. For instance, a female dove brought up
in isolation from infancy will usually lay no eggs; but the presence of a
male bird in a near-by cage, or even the caressing of her neck with a
human finger in a way reminiscent of the caresses of the male's nibbling
beak, will almost always cause an egg to be laid. It has now been demon-
strated that display and threat promote the ripening of the reproductive
organs; this will be of advantage, and especially in bad seasons, since
birds' emotions are very much at the mercy of the weather.

Before leaving this group, mention should be made of the curious fact
that in all-the-year residents who are also territory-birds, there is an
"engagement" period in the spring. For some weeks after the pair are
in possession of a territory, fertilization is not effected. The biological
reason for this is plain — it is advantageous for a bird to be on its territory
early, or it may not find one; but it must not breed before a date which
will give the probability of there being plenty of food for the young.
The physiological machinery by which it is effected resides in the fema'es;
it is only at a certain season (probably depending on a certain mean tem-
perature) that the eggs in her ovary start to grow rapidly, and only then
that her full sex-instincts arise.

Finally, we come to the large group of birds in which both male and
female not only help look after the young, but also share in incubation
and in the building of the nest. Such are the herons, the pelicans, the
grebes, the divers, and many others. In them, neither parent is biologically
the more precious; so that if protective colour is needed, it is needed by
both. Furthermore, their instincts have to be so similar in regard to nest,
eggs, and young that the similarity, it appears, has spread to their courtship
habits, too. For it is at any rate a fact that in a large number of this group
of birds, and nowhere else, we find what we must call mutual courtship —
both sexeS developing bright colours and special structures for the breed-
ing season, and both using them simultaneously in a mutual display

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS 461

(which, as with other monogamists among birds, begins only after
pairing-up).

Anyone who, like myself, has watched such birds by the hour day after
day, must be struck by the fact of their enjoyment of the courtship cere-
monies for their own sake, and the further fact that the ceremonies are
often what we may call biologically self-exhausting, in that the birds'
emotional tension is often liberated through them, instead of being stimu-
lated and leading on to actual pairing. It would seem as if these strange
and romantic displays — head-shaking, or diving for weed, or aquatic
dances breast to breast, or relieving guard on the nest with ceremonies of
parade, or presentation of a twig with wings and crest a-quiver, — as if
they constituted a bond between the two birds of the pair, binding them
together so long as the breeding season lasted by emotional links. And
after all, why not? Does not something similar obtain in human society?
And does it not there play a valuable role, in cementing with love and
joy the racially important edifice of the family? And if it has this value
in man, why not in these birds, for whom too the co-operation of both
parents for the good of the family is essential ?

Here then we see display pressed, not merely into the service of one
male against the rest, not merely facilitating fertilization, but into that of
the super-individual unit, the family. And it is interesting that the family
life of birds attains its highest development in these forms which have,
we may say, equal sex rights and duties.

In yet other cases we see display becoming social, and courtship tending
(as again sometimes in man) to be again diverted from its original char-
acter of individual wooing, this time toward the publicity of the dance.
Among birds I myself have investigated, this is best seen in the oyster-
catcher, the bold black-and-white shore bird, with red bill, sometimes
known as sea-pie. Gatherings of eight or ten birds of this species may
be seen in spring, all careering around together in their stiff courtship
attitude with neck outthrust and long bill pointing vertically downwards,
and a piercing noise of trilled piping issuing from their throats. Observa-
tion revealed that this is not only the commonest form of display, but
the only one used while on the ground; that it may be employed by the
male alone, or mutually by male and female together; and that, in addition
to its courtship function, it expresses jealous hostility of other trespassing
birds, whether trespassing on territorial or sexual rights. When, in a flock
in early spring, courtship begins, other birds may join in the excitement;
hostility re-enforces love, and soon the whole number are careering round
in frenzied excitement which is, it seems, neither sexual nor hostile, but

462 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

social. Here the social dance appears to have little or no special function,
but is rather a biological accident.

Psychologically, one of the most interesting things about bird courtship
is the frequency with which in display the birds will carry in their beaks
a piece of the material of which their nest is built. This holds good even
for the Adelie penguins, charmingly described by Dr. Levick. Here the
nest is nothing but a rim of stones round a depression; and accordingly
the male presents stones to his mate as part of his courtship. Interestingly
enough, this action sometimes becomes diverted to serve other instincts
and emotions, such as wonder — the birds will present stones to dogs and
to men; and Dr. Levick confesses to having felt quite embarrassed the
first time he was the recipient! Still another tale hangs by these stones.
The jitting birds are all the time stealing stones from each other's nests.
Levick painted a number of stones different colours, and placed them at
one margin of the nesting area. After this he could mark the rate of their
progress (all by theft!) across the colony; and found that the red stones
travelled much quicker than the rest. This is of great theoretical interest,
for red is a colour which is to all intents and purposes absent in the
penguin's environment — and yet they prefer it above all others. If a male
penguin could grow a red patch he would probably be very quick to gain
a mate.

Such an example also shows in what sort of way the extraordinary
bowers of the bower-bird can have developed. These are a blend between
art gallery and museum, usually a tunnel of twigs with a collection of
shells, bones, berries, and flowers at one end. In one species a space of
ground is cleared, and large leaves laid upon it, their silvery undersur-
face upwards. As they wither, they are replaced; if they are blown over,
the silver side is turned up once more.

Among the mammals, there is on the whole little courtship or display
by the males, but correspondingly more fighting. This probably depends
on the fact that the reproductive instincts of the female mammal are more
rigidly under a definite physiological control, less under the fluid control
of higher, emotional centres; the male deer or elephant-seal has but to
guard his harem, and they will automatically accept him in due time.
There is, however, a great deal still to be discovered of the courtships of
monogamous mammals — a difficult subject, because so many are nocturnal
or burrowers, but one that would well repay study. Among some intelli-
gent quadrupeds, however, such as the elephant, a pleasant mutual court-
ship, of trunk-caresses, has been described; and when we move up towards
Homo sapiens and reach the monkeys and apes, we find a number of dis-
play and threat characters among the males. Some are to us repulsive, like

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS 463

the naked scarlet and azure cheeks of the Mandril, or the blue of Ste-
venson's

. . . blue-behinded ape that skips

about the trees of Paradise.

But others, like the orang or some of the marmosets with their mustachios,
or the Satan monkey with his fine beard, are curiously reminiscent of our-
selves, and we are reminded of Mr. Hilaire Belloc's baboon —

The Bib Baboon who lives upon
The plains of Caribou
He goes about with nothing on
— A shocking thing to do.

But if he dressed respectably

And let his whiskers grow,

How like that Bib Baboon would be

to Miser — So-and-So!

Courtship in animals is the outcome of four major steps in evolution.
First, the development of sexuality; secondly, the separation of the sexes;
thirdly, internal fertilization, or at least the approximation of males and
females; and finally, the development of efficient sense-organs and brains.
Without any one of these, there would never have existed that host of
strange and lovely features of life, summed up under the head of court-
ship, which beautify the appearance and variegate the existence of so many
of the higher animals, including our own species.

1940

Magic Acres

ALFRED TOOMBS

THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE THE HENS LAY COLORED
eggs, where the tomatoes sprout whiskers, and the apples defy the law
of gravity. Here magicians grow a hog that won't sunburn or a chicken
with superdrumsticks or a bee with a better disposition. They keep a psy-
chologist in attendance on the dogs; they wake up the chrysanthemums at
midnight for a stretch and a yawn, and they carefully count a bug's heart-
beat.

This is the Wonderland of Agriculture, where scientists build birds,
beasts, bugs to order. It is the United States Department of Agriculture's
Research Center at Beltsville, Md., where new types of plants and ani-
mals are turned out to blueprint specifications, just like new-model auto
mobiles or airplanes.

The Beltsville Research Center is a great laboratory, like those run by
big manufacturers, where elements are constantly being fused to bring
forth new products. But, instead of experimenting with chemicals or elec
tricity, the scientists at Beltsville are redesigning and remodeling nature
to meet modern needs — putting a supercharger on the process of evolu-
tion.

As a result, you can dream up just about any kind of animal or plant
you'd like, and Beltsville can turn it out for you. There is the case of Lady
Burke Ormsby Gerbem Cola Ollie, for instance. Lady B.'s name won't be
found in Burse's Peerage, but she's a lot more important than many whose
titles are recorded there. She is a cow, but a mighty important cow, be-
cause, by breeding her, Beltsville has proved that you can get a good herd
of milk cows by selecting their sires carefully. Lady B. and all her sisters
give an average of eight hundred pounds of butterfat a year, which is twice
as much as the average cow yields. Thus Beltsville has pointed a way to-
ward doubling milk production.

The men in the fruit and vegetable department are so far advanced in
working wonders that they consider it child's play to grow pears on an

464

MAGIC ACRES 465

apple tree or to grow red and yellow apples on the same tree. They are
concentrating on more important things, such as fuzz-free peaches, tear-
less onions, and the family-size watermelon.

If Newton had parked himself under a Beltsville apple tree, waiting for
the idea for the law of gravity to bounce off his head, he'd be sitting there
yet. 'Apples don't drop off the trees there.

For a long time the applegrowers had been up against a tough proposi-
tion. Just when their crops were getting ripe, along would come the law
of gravity and dump about one third of the apples on the ground. Apples
that fall aren't worth much on the market, so when they started dropping
the growers hurried and picked the rest. As a result, many of the apples
were picked before they had reached the peak of their perfection. With
one third on the ground and most of the rest of the apples imperfectly
colored and ripened, the growers didn't get much out of the crop.

The apple men at Beltsville began experimenting with plant hormones
after they had heard that their fellows in the holly-wreath department had
been using a hormone mixture to make the leaves stick on Christmas
wreaths. They discovered that they could spray a little of the mixture on
the apple trees just when the fruit showed signs of getting ready to drop
and keep it on the branches for another two weeks. Thus the growers
could pick the apples when they had achieved just the proper rosy color.

It takes only half a teaspoonful of the plant hormones to one hundred
gallons of water to make the apples hang on like an obnoxious drunk. If
you repeat the treatment at regular intervals the apples will never fall.
One tree at Beltsville had fruit hanging from its limbs in January, with
snow on the ground.

The truck farmers of the South could tell the story of the tomatoes
with whiskers which saved the ten-million-dollar-a-year tomato-growing
industry from what looked like sudden death. In this case Beltsville beat
odds of forty thousand to one to succeed.

Some years ago the tomato growers found that their plants were being
wiped out inexorably by a blight known as tomato rust. Beltsville began
to experiment and finally, after raising thousands of plants, came through
with a new model that paid no attention to rust blight. But the end was
not in sight, for along came a new disease, known as wilt, which attacked
the new-type plant. The growers sent another S O S to Beltsville.

About this time some dreamer in the horticulture station at Beltsville
remembered a funny little w^ld tomato that grew in Peru. This plant had
defied all comers in the disease line for hundreds of years, and if anything
could stand off the rust and the wilt this looked like the one. There was

466 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

only one minor drawback: the Peruvian tomato wasn't edible, and it was
covered with a fine, thick growth of whiskers.

They began the work of crossbreeding, which made the Peruvian to-
mato bigger and better. But for a long time they couldn't get rid of the
whiskers.

Nobody stopped to figure the odds against success until it was all over.
But when they finally succeeded in growing a big, tasty, smooth-shaven
tomato on the Peruvian disease-resistant stock they checked back and dis-
covered it had been necessary to turn out forty thousand different kinds
of plants before they got what they wanted.

Beltsville's work of improving upon nature has carried the scientists on
some excursions into strange realms. After years of crossing, recrossing,
and double-crossing they turned out a streamlined turkey, nearly all white
meat, designed for small families. This new turkey enables the average
family to reach the hash stage in about three days. How do you like your
chickens? Beltsville can fix one up with almost all white meat or all dark
meat. It also produces a fowl with drumsticks big enough to ring bells and
hens that lay eggs in standard colors.

The building up of big drumsticks is more a question of environment
than heredity. These chickens are turned loose in a big enclosure, where
the feed has been scattered all over. The chickens keep running from
dawn to dusk in search of food, and this builds up their leg muscles.

The colored eggs were developed during nutritive experiments. It was
discovered that certain foods and dyes transmitted color to the eggs. It was
also found that special qualities could be developed in eggs for special pur-
poses. For instance, they have chickens which do nothing but lay eggs
especially designed for poaching. There is a peculiar quality in the white
of these eggs which makes them poach to the taste of the goutiest cus-
tomer.

One of the big problems which vexes poultry breeders is separating baby
chicks by sex, so they can concentrate on the hens-to-be. Beltsville has been
working on this problem, trying to get an arrangement whereby all male
chicks will be hatched with some identifying mark. They've bred a line
now where the male chicks all have a black stripe, and it looks as if the
trouble is licked.

There's a kind of college course for canines", with a psychologist in at-
tendance, at Beltsville. This experiment has two objectives — to produce a
better farm dog and, secondly, to determine whether special abilities and
traits of character can be transmitted with certainty from one generation
to another.
The dog experiment started about four years ago, with four types of

MAGIC ACRES 467

dogs. There were Pulis, a breed of talented Hungarian sheep dog; Border
collies and German shepherds, chosen for their intelligence, aggressiveness,
and sheepherding ability, and, for contrast, chows which had no record
as shepherds but were stable and smart. Pure-bred pups were bred from
each type, and the young dogs were given extensive tests.

The objective of the first tests was to determine the character, person-
ality, and abilities of each individual dog. It was discovered that some of
the dogs were not very bright; some were mean; some were obedient, and
some just didn't give a hang about school. Some of the Pulis knew as pup-
pies, without being trained, how to handle sheep. When the characteris-
tics of each dog had been established and recorded the work of cross-
breeding began — to find out whether the new generation would pick up
the parents' virtues or faults. Would a pup born of a Puli-chow union have
the Puli's sheepherding ability and the chow's stability? Or would it in-
herit the less desirable characteristics, such as the chow's lack of talent as a
shepherd and the Puli's excitability ?

Ada was one of the dogs born of this second generation. Her mother
was a German shepherd — a former Seeing-Eye dog — and her father was a
Puli. Ada was bright, her psychology tests demonstrated, but she wasn't
so hot as a shepherd. She was mated to Paul, a pure Puli, which had
scored fairly well on intelligence and had proved himself an ace among
the sheepherders. A litter of nine blessed this union, and when they had
completed their final exams it was found that four of the dogs had main-
tained Ada's extraordinary intelligence and that all the rest stood near the
head of the class. What was more significant, they were all very handy at
herding sheep.

Farmer, one of the best of these, was mated to another good dog and
became the father of six pups. The returns aren't all in on Farmer's off-
spring, but the early reports indicate that they have inherited all the fam-
ily talents. If so, and if the pups can become the proud parents of another
generation of prodigies, Beltsville will be well on its way toward breed-
ing a superdog.

More important, these experiments may establish that it is possible to
breed certain desirable talents and traits of character into a line of dogs,
just as good points are developed in show dogs. Beltsville doesn't have too
high an opinion of "show dogs," by the way. Early in the game many of
the fancy thoroughbreds turned out to be morons. Beautiful but dumb.

The job of building a better bee recently engrossed Beltsville. Redesign-
ing the bee for modern needs is just as intricate a task as planning a new
fighting plane. Not so long ago there came an insistent demand from bee-
keepers for a new model with a longet tongue. A bee with a long tongue

468 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

ran dig deep down into the big flowers and get honey that other bees can
only dream about. Beltsville turned out some test models, but they learned
that they were going to have to make a lot of changes in the fundamental
design of the bee. They're still working on it.

They know what they want — a bee with a gentle disposition, a love of
its home, ability to fly in cold weather, extra storage space for honey, and
some distinguishing characteristics — like stars on the wings — that will
make it possible to distinguish the new bee from the old. Not only the
bee-keepers, but farmers in general — especially those owning orchards —
are demanding a new-model bee. Beltsville showed how much bees, which
increase pollination, can mean to the owner of a fruit orchard. They
ordered some special bees into action in the Northwest fruit country
recently at blossomtime, and production went up faster than an anti-
aircraft shell.

The entomology division, where the bee designers are at work, has
other departments, where scientists are figuring out some improved meth-
ods of killing off other kinds of insects. Here are men who patiently feed
the best tweeds to the moths, who count the heartbeat of bugs to see how
long it takes different poisons to act, who raise millions of mosquitoes to
find out the best way to kill them. These men all share a common ideal —
better bugs and fewer of them.

In the animal division they are working with fifty Persian lambs, a
breed with which the American farmer has had little luck. They were
bred at Beltsville and they are as good as any Persian lambs that have
been born anywhere. Beltsville is seeking to establish a strain of karakul
sheep which will flourish in this country and has worked out a formula
of three quarters karakul and one quarter native sheep which looks good.
If the experiment is successful and the precious wool begins to sprout or
native sheep the American farmer will have another source of income.

A few years ago vegetable oils began to replace lard, and the farmers
suddenly realized that their hogs were devoting a large part of their time
to turning out fat that nobody wanted. That got Beltsville started on re-
modeling the hog, and they've now produced a porker with the weight
transferred back into the bacon-and-ham department, where it gets a nice
round price. While they were at it Beltsville threw in a few other innova-
tions. The result is a superhog which, in addition to its meat-giving vir-
tues, is nimble on its feet, immune to sunburn, and safe from nervous
breakdowns.

Pigs, you see, is not just pigs. There are many kinds, all of which have
their virtues. The Danish Landrace, for instance, is one of the best meat-
producing hogs in the world. The Danes have been raising them for years

MAGIC ACRES 469

but have been reluctant to let them out o£ the country. In 1934 a Depart-
ment of Agriculture man persuaded the Danes to allow a couple of dozen
of their prize pigs to pay a visit to the United States, and most of these
wound up at Beltsville. The Danes would never know them now.

For Beltsville began to incorporate their virtues in the general design
of the superhog. The Landrace, of itself, was not the ideal hog for this
country — it had a weak back, weak feet, and a white complexion which
would be subject to sunburn in most of the hog-raising states of this coun-
try.

To get rid of these weaknesses Beltsville began to breed the Danish hogs
to such American strains as the Poland China and Duroc-Jersey. Now,
after several generations, the main characteristics of the new hog have
been pretty well established. It has a strong, arched back, laden with pork
chops and roasts, and the Landraces' long, streamlined body and thick
legs, heavy with bacon and hams. The new hog will be red, able to stand
the summer sun of Kansas or Florida, and nimble in the barnyard.

They've even tested the temperament of the new piggie. Nervous prima-
donna hogs, you see, spend so much time fretting that they don't get fat
as quickly as they should. By giving the hogs tests for nerves Beltsville is
trying to eliminate the flighty porkers and breed an animal which can
look on life with tranquillity and a good appetite.

Just about the time Beltsville got the new lardless hog ready the war got
tough and the English found they were short on lard. It was suddenly dis-
covered that this country would have to turn out a lot of lard. Beltsville
turned its attention to this problem, but it's keeping the streamlined hog
under cover until the fighting blows over and the bottom drops out of the
lard market again.

Just as with lard, America is constantly being called upon to make sud-
den changes in its farm economy to meet new tactics in the war. This
country has to improve the model of its crops, just as it must improve air-
plane models, to keep up with new developments. But new-model crops,
like new-model planes, don't just grow. There must be research behind
them. And behind our new agriculture is Beltsville— where life is made
to order. 7947

PART FIVE

THE WORLD OF MAN

Synopsis

A. FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION IS IN SOME WAYS A LONG ROAD,
in others a very short one. From life in the trees to that in a modern sky-
scraper is a big jump, but it has been taken by animals which are closely
allied to their cousins. The controversy on the subject is still fresh, as witness
the Tennessee trial, but Darwin suggests the evidence which disposes of it
in his classic Evidence of the Descent of Man. When he wrote it, the road
man has taken was not completely understood, nor is it yet. But what we
now know is indicated in two selections. Hooton of Harvard describes man's
relation to the primitive primates and later apes in The Upstart of the
Animal Kingdom. Baker shows how with the Java man, the Piltdown man
and others, we are gradually completing the chain of Missing Links which
bind ape and man.

Out of the shadows of primeval forests, primitive man emerges. He sits
before the smoking embers of a fire which he worships but does not under-
stand. He watches the smoke ascend toward a heaven where the gods of the
wind, the sun and the rain live and rule the world. This is Neanderthal man.
This is the man of the Stone Age. This is the man of the Bronze Age. These
ancient races, like all other peoples, looked at the sky and wondered about
the creation of the world and man. As they wondered, they told a story to
their children. It was a story filled with magic and superstition, with their
observations of the heavens and earth and living things. Such is the tale told
by the Quiche' Indians of Guatemala, in the Popol Vuh or Sacred Book.

To change from such primitive races to civilized man can be a bitter step.
In Lessons in Living from the Stone Age, the Arctic explorer Stefansson
watches the undermining of a co-operative form of society, with nothing to

471

472 THE WORLD OF MAN

take its place. He wonders, as we may also, which is the "good" life: the
primitive or the modern competitive form.

Primitive races are still widespread. Even the various civilized races have
diverged in form of skull and shape of body. No one is better qualified than
Sir Arthur Keith, the great British authority, to tell us how typical Germans,
Englishmen, Chinese and Negroes differ among themselves, as he does in
Racial Characters of the Body.

B. THE HUMAN MACHINE

"A sperm and an egg; you, like every other human being and most other
animals began life just as that." Each egg and each sperm contains twenty-
four chromosomes which in turn contain the genes. Everything that comes
to us from our ancestors is contained in these tiny units — perhaps the ulti-
mate units of life. Scheinfeld tells about them in the fascinating You and
Heredity, which gives the facts about a controversial subject. He also pre-
pares the way for Margaret Shea Gilbert's Biography of the Unborn, which
carries us from the entry of the male sperm into the female egg through the
first nine months of our lives as individuals.

So we are born, the most marvelous machines in creation. Even today the
greater part of our functioning is imperfectly understood. In How the Human
Body Is Studied, Sir Arthur Keith takes us back to the method which first
began to give us scientific knowledge. Here in the dissecting room, we catch
a glimpse of the arrangement of bones and muscles, the circulation of the
blood (the wonderful process discovered by William Harvey), the tendons
and nerves. Sir Arthur tells us too little about the hormones and the glands.
In his space, he can give us only a fleeting glimpse of human anatomy. But
he does show us that whatever else man is, he is a machine.

Man, then, is the product of the process of evolution, of the laws of life
and heredity, of a chemical and physical machinery. This is the man that
Julian Huxley considers in Variations on a Theme by Darwin, showing that
for all the incredible complexity of his actions and reactions, man must be
studied as a product of his environment.

C. THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

Infested by parasites, surrounded by bacteria, a prey to viruses, the human
machine fills us with a persisting amazement. How can it function so well so
much of the time? Much of the answer lies in man's understanding of his
own bodily enemies. The quest goes back to the most primitive of medicine
men. But as Clendening shows in Hippocrates the Greek — the End of Magiv,
there came a moment when the order of nature and not the whim of the
gods was recognized as causing disease. Perhaps Hippocrates was not the
first to make this initial discovery, perhaps his Oath, which still hangs in

THE WORLD OF MAN 473

doctors' offices, was the work of others. Whatever his identity, the man who
did it was the intellectual father of the investigators of today.

We have space for only a few of the highlights of the subsequent story,
[enner, whose classic paper An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the
Variolae Vaccinae shows the steps in his discovery of the methods of inocu-
lation against smallpox, was a far greater man than Waterhouse of Massachu-
setts. Yet in The History of the Kine Pox, Waterhouse, with his scientific
detachment, his willingness to face any eventuality in his search for the
truth, was an outstanding human figure in the conquest of disease. Perhaps
that passionate love of truth reached its acme in Louis Pasteur. Vallery-
Radot's story of his life is one of the greatest biographies in any field. The
blend of scientific insight and human emotion contained in Louis Pasteur
and the Conquest of Rabies makes it an indispensable contribution.

The search is brought almost up to date with Leprosy in the Philippines,
part of Victor I leiser's "Odyssey." It is a tragic tale because there is still only
a faint gleam of hope for the thousands of sufferers he knew. Yet in that
faint hope the lepers feel themselves "on the threshold of deliverance/'

With the coming of war, the struggle against disease is intensified. We
hear more of tropical disease — malaria and bacillary dysentery. In War Medi-
cine and War Surgery, George W. Gray tells what is being done to combat
these parasites. He explains too how toxoids, vaccines and plasma are helping
the wounded and diseased; how the record of lives saved at Pearl Harbor
established "a new era in surgical therapy/'

D. MAN'S MIND

One of the most tragic and difficult problems of modern war is the in-
crease in mental disease among those returned from the front. It may be, as
has recently been stated, that nobody is fitted to fight in a modern war.
Normal mental functioning must mean a fair balance in man's processes of
thinking as well as a balance between mind and body.

In his analysis of Thinking, James Harvey Robinson shows the importance
of conscious knowledge, of reverie, of decision, of rationalization and above
all of creative thought. In Imagination Creatrix, this last is analyzed more
fully, out of his long study of the creative processes of men of genius, by
John Livingston Lowes. This whole Treasury is an example of what Lowes
describes. We follow it in the work of Copernicus and Darwin. We see it in
the laboratories of Madame Curie and Pasteur, the quarry of Hugh Miller,
the garden of Gregor Mendel.

We see it too in the Psychology of Sigmund Freud, described by Dr.
Brill. After many centuries, a new voice has been heard in the understanding
of mental processes and the treatment of abnormality. Yet Freudianism is
not the whole story of the modern study of insanity. New methods of shock
and surgery have been discovered, and again that excellent interpreter George
W. Gray paints the picture in Brain Storms and Brain Waves.

A. FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

The Evidence of the Descent of Man from
Some Lower Form

CHARLES DARWIN

From The Descent of Man

THE BODILY STRUCTURE OF MAN

IT IS NOTORIOUS THAT MAN IS CONSTRUCTED ON THE
same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his
skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a monkey, bat,
or seal. So it is with his muscles, nerves, blood-vessels and internal
viscera. The brain, the most important of all the organs, follows the
same law, as shewn by Huxley and other anatomists. Bischoff, who is a
hostile witness, admits that every chief fissure and fold in the brain of
man has its analogy in that of the orang; but he adds that at no period of
development do their brains perfectly agree; nor could perfect agree-
ment be expected, for otherwise their mental powers would have been
the same. But it would be superfluous here to give further details on
the correspondence between man and the higher mammals in the
structure of the brain and all other parts of the body.

It may, however, be worth while to specify a few points, not directly
or obviously connected with structure, by which this correspondence or
relationship is well shewn.

Man is liable to receive from the lower animals, and to communicate
to them, certain diseases, as hydrophobia, variola, the glanders, syphilis,
cholera, herpes etc., and this fact proves the close similarity of their
tissues and blood, both in minute structure and composition, far more
plainly than does their comparison under the best microscope, or by
the aid of the best chemical analysis.

Man is infested with internal parasites, sometimes causing fatal effects;

475

476 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

and is plagued by external parasites, all of which belong to the same
genera or families as those infesting other mammals.

The whole process of that most important function, the reproduction
of the species, is strikingly the same in all mammals, from the first act
of courtship by the male, to the birth and nurturing of the young.
Monkeys are born in almost as helpless a condition as our own infants:
and in certain genera the young differ fully as much in appearance from
the adults, as do our children from their full-grown parents. It has been
urged by some writers, as an important distinction, that with man the
young arrive at maturity at a much later age than with any other animal :
but if we look to the races of mankind which inhabit tropical countries
the difference is not great, for the orang is believed not to be adult till
the age of from ten to fifteen years. Man differs from woman in size,
bodily strength, hairiness, etc., as well as in mind, in the same manner
as do the two sexes of many mammals. It is, in short, scarcely possible
to exaggerate the close correspondence in general structure, in the minute
structure of the tissues, in chemical composition and in constitution,
between man and the higher animals, especially the anthropomorphous
apes.

EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT

Man is developed from an ovule, about the i25th of an inch in diameter,
which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals. The embryo
itself at a very early period can hardly be distinguished from that of
other members of the vertebrate kingdom. At this period the arteries
run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiae which are
not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the sides of the
neck still remain, marking their former position. At a somewhat later
period, when the extremities are developed, "the feet of lizards and
mammals/' as the illustrious Von Baer remarks, "the wings and feet of
birds, no less than the hands and feet of man, all arise from the same
fundamental form." "It is," says Prof. Huxley, "quite in the later stages
of development that the young human being presents marked differences
from the young ape, while the latter departs as much from the dog in
its developments, as the man does. Startling as this last assertion may
appear to be, it is demonstrably true."

After the foregoing statements made by such high authorities, it would
be superfluous on my part to give a number of borrowed details, shewing
that the embryo of man closely resembles that of other mammals. It
may, however, be added, that the human embryo likewise resembles
in various points of structure, certain low forms when adult. For instance,

THE EVIDENCE OF THE DESCENT OF MAN 477

the heart at first exists as a simple pulsating vessel; the excreta are voided
through a cloacal passage; and the os coccyx projects like a true tail,
"extending considerably beyond the rudimentary legs." In the embryos
of all air-breathing vertebrates, certain glands, called the corpora Wolf-
fiana, correspond with, and act like the kidneys of mature fishes. Even at
a later embryonic period, some striking resemblances between man and
the lower animals may be observed. Bischoff says that the convolutions
of the brain in a human foetus at the end of the seventh month reach
about the same stage of development as in a baboon when adult. The
great toe, as Prof. Owen remarks, "which forms the fulcrum when
standing or walking, is perhaps the most characteristic peculiarity in the
human structure," but in an embryo, about an inch in length, Prof.
Wyman found "that the great toe was shorter than the others; and,
instead of being parallel to them, projected at an angle from the side
of the foot, thus corresponding with the permanent condition of this
part in the quadrumana." I will conclude with a quotation from Huxley,
who after asking, Does man originate in a different way from a dog,
bird, frog, or fish? says, "the reply is not doubtful for a moment; without
question, the mode of origin, and the early stages of development of
man, are identical with those of the animals immediately below him in
the scale: without a doubt in these respects, he is far nearer to apes than
the apes are to the dog."

RUDIMENTS

Not one of the higher animals can be named which does not bear
some part in a rudimentary condition; and man forms no exception to
the rule. Rudimentary organs are eminently variable; and this is partly
intelligible, as they are useless, or nearly useless, and consequently are
no longer subjected to natural selection. They often become wholly
suppressed. When this occurs, they are nevertheless liable to occasional
reappearance through reversion — a circumstance well worthy of attention.

Rudiments of various muscles have been observed in many parts of
the human body; and not a few muscles, which are regularly present
in some of the lower animals can occasionally be detected in man in a
greatly reduced condition. Every one must have noticed the power which
many animals, especially horses, possess of moving or twitching their
skin; and this is effected by the panniculus carnosus. Remnants of this
muscle in an efficient state are found in various parts of our bodies; for
instance, the muscle on the forehead, by which the eyebrows are raised.

Some few persons have the power of contracting the superficial muscles
on their scalps; and these muscles are in a variable and partly rudi-

478 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

mentary condition. M. A. de Candolle has communicated to me a
curious instance of the long-continued persistence or inheritance of this
power, as well as of its unusual development. He knows a family, in
which one member, the present head of the family, could, when a youth,
pitch several heavy books from his head by the movement of the scalp
alone; and he won wagers by performing this feat. His father, uncle,
grandfather, and his three children possess the same power to the same
unusual degree. This family became divided eight generations ago into
two branches; so that the head of the above-mentioned branch is cousin
in the seventh degree to the head of the other branch. This distant
cousin resides in another part of France; and on being asked whether
he possessed the same faculty, immediately exhibited his power. This
case offers a good illustration how persistently an absolutely useless
faculty may be transmitted.

The sense of smell is of the highest importance to the greater number
of mammals — to some, as the ruminants, in warning them of danger; to
others, as the carnivora, in finding their prey; to others, again, as the
wild boar, for both purposes combined. But the sense of smell is of
extremely slight service if any, even to savages, in whom it is much
more highly developed than in the civilized races. It does not warn them
of danger, nor guide them to their food; nor does it prevent the
Esquimaux from sleeping in the most fetid atmosphere, nor many savages
from eating half-putrid meat. Those who believe in the principle of
gradual evolution, will not readily admit that this sense in its present
state was originally acquired by man, as he now exists. No doubt he
inherits the power in an enfeebled and so far rudimentary condition,
from some early progenitor, to whom it was highly serviceable, and by
whom it was continually used. We can thus perhaps understand how it
is, as Dr. Maudsley has truly remarked, that the sense of smell in man
"is singularly effective in recalling vividly the ideas and images of
forgotten scenes and places"; for we see in those animals, which have
this sense highly developed, such as dogs and horses, that old recollections
of persons and places are strongly associated with their odour.

Man differs conspicuously from all the other Primates in being almost
naked. But a few short straggling hairs are found over the greater part
of the body in the male sex, and fine down on that of the female sex.
There can be little doubt that the hairs thus scattered over the body are
the rudiments of the uniform hairy coat of the lotoer animals.

It appears as if the posterior molar or wisdom-teeth were tending to
become rudimentary in the more civilised races of man. These teeth
are rather smaller than the other molars, as is likewise the case with

THE EVIDENCE OF THE DESCENT OF MAN 479

the corresponding teeth in the chimpanzee and orang; and they have
only two separate fangs. They do not cut through the gums till about
the seventeenth year, and I have been assured by dentists that they are
much more liable to decay, and are earlier lost, than the other teeth. It
is also remarkable that they are much more liable to vary both in
structure and in the period of their development, than the other teeth.
In the Melanian races, on the other hand, the wisdom-teeth are usually
furnished with three separate fangs, and are generally sound; they also
differ from the other molars in size less than in the Caucasian races. Prof.
Schaffhausen accounts for this difference between the races by "the
posterior dental portion of the jaw being always shortened" in those
that are civilised, and this shortening may, I presume, be safely attributed
to civilised men habitually feeding on soft, cooked food, and thus using
their jaws less.

With respect to the alimentary canal, I have met with an account of
only a single rudiment, namely the vermiform appendage of the caecum.
The caecum is a branch or diverticulum of the intestine, ending in a
cul-de-sac, and is extremely long in many of the lower vegetable-feeding
mammals. In the marsupial koala it is actually more than thrice as long
as the whole body. It is sometimes produced into a long gradually-
tapering point and is sometimes constricted in parts. It appears as if,
in consequence of changed diet or habits, the caecum had become much
shortened in various animals, the vermiform appendage being left as a
rudiment of the shortened part. That this appendage is a rudiment, we
may infer from its small size, and from the evidence which Prof. Cane-
strini has collected of its variability in man. It is occasionally quite
absent, or again is largely developed. The passage is sometimes com-
pletely closed for half or two-thirds of its length, with the terminal part
consisting of a flattened solid expansion. In the orang this appendage is
long and convoluted; in man it arises from the end of the short caecum,
and is commonly from four to five inches in length, being only about
the third of an inch in diameter. Not only is it useless, but it is some-
times the cause of death, of which fact I have lately heard two instances;
this is due to small hard bodies, such as seeds, entering the passage, and
causing inflammation.

The os coccyx in man, though functionless as a tail, plainly represents
this part in other vertebrate animals. At an early embryonic period it is
free, and projects beyond the lower extremities. In certain rare and
anomalous cases, it has been known to form a small external rudiment
of a tail.

480 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

The bearing of the three great classes of facts now given is unmis-
takable. But it would be superfluous here fully to recapitulate the line
of argument given in detail in my Origin of Species. The homological
construction of the whole frame in the members of the same class is
intelligible, if we admit their descent from a common progenitor,
together with their subsequent adaptation to diversified conditions. On
any other view, the similarity of pattern between the hand of a man or
monkey, the foot of a horse, the flipper of a seal, the wing of a bat, &c.,
is utterly inexplicable. It is no scientific explanation to assert that they
have all been formed on the same ideal plan. With respect to develop-
ment, we can clearly understand, on the principle of variation super-
vening at a rather late embryonic period, and being inherited at a cor-
responding period, how it is that the embryos of wonderfully different
forms should still retain, more or less perfectly, the structure of their
common progenitor. No other explanation has ever been given of the
marvellous fact that the embryos of a man, dog, seal, bat, reptile, &c.,
can at first hardly be distinguished from each other. In order to under-
stand the existence of rudimentary organs, we have only to suppose
that a former progenitor possessed the parts in question in a perfect
state, and that under changed habits of life they became greatly reduced,
either from simple disuse, or through the natural selection of those
individuals which were least encumbered with a superfluous part.

Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man and all
other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general
model, why they pass through the same early stages of development,
and why they retain certain rudiments in common. Consequently we
ought frankly to admit their community of descent; to take any other
view, is to admit that our own structure, and that of all the animals
around us, is a mere snare laid to entrap our judgment. This conclusion
is greatly strengthened, if we look to the members of the whole animal
series and consider the evidence derived from their affinities or classifi-
cation, their geographical distribution and geological succession. It is
only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our fore-
fathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads
us to demur to this conclusion. But the time will before long come,
when it will be thought wonderful, that naturalists, who were well
acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man,
and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of &
separate act of creation.

Edition of i8j$

The Upstart of the Animal Kingdom

EARNEST A. HOOTON

PRINCIPAL PUBLIC FUNCTION OF THE ANTHRO-
-**• pologist is to instill into man a proper humility, by reminding him of
his humble origin and by demonstrating to him how short a distance he
has come from his lower mammalian forbears and in how prodigiously
long a time . . .

Through the long middle ages of life on the earth multifarious rep-
tiles had dominated the scene — aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial, herbivorous
and carnivorous, tiny and gigantic, but generally slimy. I think that by
the end of the Mesozoic Age nature had grown tired of dinosaurs — fed up
with their eggs — and felt ready for a leadership of brains. Throughout
this period there had been lying low, or rather sitting high in the tree
tops, some little long-snouted insectivores who reproduced their young in
higher mammalian fashion and suckled them at the breast instead of lay-
ing eggs passim like reptiles. In the fullness of time and at the beginning
of the Paleocene, perhaps sixty million years ago, there sprang from this
order of insectivores the first primitive primates, called lemurs.

These early lemurs were animals of small pretensions and apparently
slight evolutionary promise. They had longish snouts, laterally directed
eyes and very modest brains but they possessed the most precious of ani-
mal endowments, adaptability. This adaptability is essentially the faculty
of grasping an environmental opportunity and following, not the line of
least resistance but that of greatest opportunity. Literally and corporeally
this ability to grasp an object and a situation was centered in the prehensile
pentadactyle hands and feet, equipped with flat nails instead of claws and
with thumbs and great toes which could be opposed to the other digits.
These sensitive members could encircle a bough, pluck a leaf, pick a flea
or convey an edible object to the eyes for examination, to the snout for
smelling and to the mouth for tasting. These hands and feet were not only
prehensile but also tactile organs which enabled their small tree-dwelling
owners to explore the world and to become conscious of the various parts

481

482 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

of their own bodies inaccessible to most quadrupeds. Their greatest impor-
tance was not in being conveyors merely of food to the mouth but rather
of messages to the brain, which now began to be something more than a
sensory receptacle and a coordinator of muscular movements. The lemur
brain began to record associations, to register visual and tactile impres-
sions and to allocate to specific areas of its nervous cortex definite functions
—motor, sensory and associative. In short, these lemurs began really to
exercise their brains and to manifest intelligence. The hands called to the
brain and the latter responded, assuming the function of direction and
guidance.

Let us pause for a few moments to consider the advantages of arboreal
life to a small and weak animal. A tiny terrestrial animal has to depend
largely upon its sense of smell to warn it of the approach of enemies and
to enable it to find food. Its visual sense is of comparatively slight utility
because its horizon is restricted by its nearness to the ground. It lives in
a world of tall grass and underbrush. It "noses its way through life." Now
suppose this small animal climbs a tree. It gets up out of the wet and
away from the clutch of enemies; it has a chance to sit up and look around.
Arboreal life puts a premium upon the visual sense and the olfactory func-
tion diminishes in importance. The animal begins to look for its food
rather than to sniff for it. Agility and motor coordination are essential for
moving about in the trees and avoiding falls. On the whole no nursery
school could be more ideal for a small mammal with prehensile extrem-
ities. The original equipment of five-digited hands and feet with opposable
thumbs and great toes allowed the animal to grasp an object of whatever
shape and size and the absence of protrusive claws encouraged the use of
the finger bulbs for tactile discrimination.

The dietary afforded by the tropic forest was varied and stimulated an
omnivorous habit— extremely useful for evolutionary survival as anyone
who has lived in a boarding-house should know. Nuts, fruits, berries,
leaves and shoots for salads, birds' eggs, grubs and even birds themselves
if these could be caught— here were plenty of vitamins; and sufficient sun-
light was handy for those disposed to climb to the top of the trees.

Parental care, too, was necessitated by the arboreal habitat since the
young of mammals are relatively helpless. Those secondarily adapted for
arboreal life must be reared in a nest or carried on their mothers' bodies
until they attain the strength, agility and experience to pursue their pre-
carious aerial lives.

Nature then had provided these primitive lemurine primates with a bod-
ily equipment suitable for arboreal life, and necessity, or less probably
choice, had driven them into the trees. Here was offered, to those who

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 483

could grasp it, the educational opportunity for evolutionary advancement.
Now the most mystifying feature of evolution and of modern human life
is the variation of individuals in their capacity to utilize opportunities.
Why do some people absorb and assimilate an education and others
merely excrete it? The arboreal habitat for some of these early primates
was a catalytic agent for evolutionary progress and for others merely a
lotus-eating existence. Students of organic evolution dismiss the question
by asserting that some animals are progressive and adaptive whereas others
are conservative and rigid. As a matter of fact the secret of progress ap-
pears to be the ability of the animal to utilize the advantages of an environ-
ment without molding its organism too narrowly to the requirements of
any particular mode of life. The really progressive animal must if possible
adapt environment to itself and not become too malleable to its influence.
It must maintain its organic independence, it must possess a certain initia-
tive whereby it picks and chooses, and when choice is narrowed to its ex-
treme disadvantage it needs to move on in search of better things. There
are today, of course, plenty of lemurs in Madagascar, Africa, and Indonesia,
and they are probably very little changed from their original proto-primate
status in bodily form and in habits. These, however, are the stultified and
backward children of the Order — the perennial kindergarteners.

Practically contemporary with the early lemurs, possibly an offshoot
from some gifted lemuroid stock, were other and more precocious pri-
mates, the tarsioids. To see what they were like we have had to study
their few relatively unmodified modern descendants, confined to the
islands of Indonesia. These tarsioids differed from the lemurs in a number
of significant and promising features and habits. First, instead of running
on all fours through the trees they hopped on their hind legs. An animal
which has to use all four limbs for locomotion and support is necessarily
dependent upon its snout for tactile and feeding purposes, but these little
arboreal tarsioids have "emancipated their fore-limbs" for purposes of pre-
hension, exploration and hand-feeding. Release from the function of
bough-gripping foreshadowed tool-using, tool-making and the ultimate
genesis of material culture. Further, the hopping tarsier sits up and looks
around; it carries the long axis of its body perpendicular to the ground
instead of parallel with it. It takes a vertical rather than a horizontal view
of life.

It is a principle of Nature that organs increase in size when their func-
tions are enlarged and atrophy when their activity is diminished. In the
tarsioids there took place an elongation of the tarsus (that portion of the
foot which supports the hopping animal) . Far more important, however,
were changes in the face, the brain case and the brain itself, associated

484 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

with the upright sitting posture and the freedom of the fore-limbs. For an
animal largely dependent upon its olfactory sense, the snout, terminating
in a moist muzzle or rhinarium, not only serves as the principal tactile
organ; it also collects the scents and odors by which the animal's existence
is guided. Furthermore the snout includes infer iorly the jaws, the incisive
front ends of which are projected forward of the eyes in order that the
animal can graze and still see what it is eating and what is going on
around it. But with the free use of prehensile hands as organs of touch and
conveyors of food a projecting snout loses its function. Thus we find the
snout greatly shortened in the tarsier. Furthermore, the visual sense in
this animal has become wholly dominant over the olfactory. The brain has
swollen enormously and particularly those portions of the cortex or ner-
vous covering in which vision is represented; the neopallium, or new cloak
of the brain, has spread like a tent over the primitive olfactory bulbs, cov-
ering, obscuring and dwarfing them. To accommodate this larger brain
the skull has grown backward so that now it nearly balances upon the
vertical spinal column. The tarsier can hold up its head without straining
the neck muscles with the weight of the thrust-out and over-balancing
snout.

Lemurs and lower mammals have eyes laterally directed on each side
of a protrusive snout. They see with one eye at a time and the fields of
vision do not overlap. Such wall-eyed brutes lack stereoscopic vision
whereby the eyes can focus simultaneously upon the same object and with-
out which there can be no depth of perception and but little perspective.
The tarsier, in contrast, has formed the habit of holding objects in front
of its eyes for examination. Whether for this reason or another, its eyes
have tended to swivel forward toward the frontal plane so that their axes
of vision are less divergent although not yet parallel. Probably the fields
of vision overlap to some extent but true stereoscopic sight has not yet been
realized. Moreover this little animal displays certain anatomical precocities
of the reproductive system which foreshadow the higher primates and
determine the consensus of zoological opinion that monkeys, apes and
even man must own some progressive Eocene form of this arboreal hopper
as their ultimate primate ancestor.

It would have taken a zoologist gifted with extraordinary evolutionary
foresight to predict from the generalized Eocene tarsioids the final emer-
gence of Homo. But if we move on to the Oligocene period, not more
than thirty-five millions of years ago, we find in the dried up lake bed of
the Fayum west of the Nile ample evidence of the great evolutionary
strides which the primates had taken in their first quarter of a hundred
million years. Primitive and generalized Old World monkeys appear —

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 485

and from a tarsioid to a monkey is a bigger jump than from an ape to a
man. The monkeys have much larger and better developed brains than
tarsioids. Instead of being smooth and probably devoid of well-defined
association areas, the surface of the cerebral hemispheres, or forebrain, is
now wrinkled or convoluted, affording more nervous cortical surface. The
occipital lobes of the forebrain in monkeys overhang the hind brain or
cerebellum, which in the tarsiers is naked and exposed. The greatest ex-
pansion in the monkey brain has occurred in the so-called association areas,
especially in the frontal and parietal regions. The visual and general
sensory areas are now widely separated and well differentiated. Binocular
or stereoscopic vision exists; there is an advanced method of intra-uterine
nourishment of the young; without doubt there are enhanced mental fac-
ulties such as better memory, clearer association of ideas, intensified emo-
tional activity, more acute tactile discrimination and sharper attention —
above all, perhaps, the genesis of a certain curiosity, a tendency to poke
into and investigate things. The faculty which makes a monkey mis-
chievous is precisely that which in man has created something unique in
the world of life — a material culture. It manifests itself in lower primate
forms in an irresistible inclination to pull things apart; in man it puts
things together. The monkey uses his agile fingers and his restless brain
in play; man puts them to work.

We know little of these Oligocene monkeys except that they were small,
primitive and generalized ancestors of the simian troops which people
the forests of Asia and Africa today. However, just as the precocious tarsier
appears in the same Eocene deposits with the less advanced lemur, so in
the Oligocene beds of the Fayum the first tiny anthropoid ape is a con-
temporary of the ancestral Old World Monkey. The rise of this small ape
was the second greatest achievement of organic evolution — the explicit
promise of a reasoning animal which should create a civilization. There
remains of Propliopithecus, ape of the dawn, only the half of a lower jaw
and some teeth but these bespeak incontrovertibly a form which must
have stood at the very point of divergence of the anthropoid-humanoid
stock from that of the monkeys.

You may inquire how paleontologists and zoologists are able to trace
descent through teeth, which seem small and inadequate pegs upon which
to hang whole genealogies. The expert upon fossil remains has to work
with those parts of the body which best resist the attacks of time. In most
animals these happen to be the teeth and the lower jaws — relatively tough
and indigestible morsels which no beast of prey can stomach. The teeth
are composed of dentine, coated on the crowns and necks with hard
enamel, and they normally outlast all other skeletal parts. One of the most

486 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

sinister signs of degression in civilized man is that he holds the undesirably
unique position of being the only animal whose teeth commonly decay so
early in life that his open mouth reveals a charnel house — an inadequately
whitened sepulchre of rotting dentition.

The number and kind of teeth and the details of their cusp pattern have
been found to be the most reliable criteria of relationship which com-
parative anatomy affords. Not only does the architecture of the teeth fur-
nish a substantial clue as to the diet of the owner; it also indicates his
descent. Thus the molar teeth of the little Propliopithecus show substan-
tially the same five-cusped pattern as those of later fossil anthropoids, the
present great apes and man. That is about all that we know of Prop-
liopithecus except that he stands closer to the line of the modern gibbon
than to that of the giant primates which ultimately gave rise to man,
gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan. We may, however, postulate that this
common ancestor of apes and man had a much larger brain relative to his
body size than any existing monkey although in actual bulk he could have
been no larger than a human suckling. It is probable also that Prop-
liopithecus was an arboreal brachiator — i.e. he moved about the trees by
taking long swings with his arms, the body suspended in an upright posi-
tion and the legs trailing in the air. This brachiating habit, with conse-
quent elongation of the arms, is characteristic of all existing anthropoid
apes and there are ample traces of its former presence in the ancestral line
of man. With it developed the vertical suspension of the viscera by means
of sheets of membrane which hold the organs in place and prevent them
from slumping into the pelvic cavity when the trunk is upright. Such sus-
pension is a prerequisite for the biped erect posture on the ground, after-
wards adopted by the hominids. Propliopithecus still lived on a generalized
and mainly frugivorous diet such as the trees of the tropical forest afford;
he was no predatory carnivore.

Our next glimpse of primate evolution is at the beginning of the Mio-
cene period, perhaps nineteen million years ago. By this time the Old
World monkeys are well developed and the anthropoid ape line has dif-
ferentiated a full-fledged gibbon and the first of the generalized giant
apes. The present gibbons are restricted to the southeastern portion of
Asia and adjacent islands of the Indonesian archipelago. They are small
arboreal anthropoids standing about three feet in height and very slender
in build. With their prodigious arms (so long that they touch the ground
when the animal stands erect) they swing from bough to bough and from
tree to tree, easily clearing spaces of twenty to thirty feet. Like monkeys
and tarsiers they produce only one offspring at a birth and take very good
care of that single infant. When on the ground they run on their hind

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 487

legs, keeping the knees bent and holding their arms aloft like a sprinter
about to breast the tape. They have big and complicated brains, somewhat
projecting jaws with long, sabre-like teeth, elongated and slender hands
and feet with opposable thumbs and great toes. The Miocene gibbons were
somewhat less specialized than those of the present day but were other-
wise substantially like them.

Much more important are the remains of the generalized giant anthro-
poid apes of the Lower and Middle Miocene, which are often lumped to-
gether into one big group — the Dryopithecus family. The earliest of these
apes appear on the Mediterranean edge of the Libyan desert but later they
are distributed through Europe and along the southern foothills of the
Himalayas, in the Siwalik deposits. These anthropoids are represented for
the most part by isolated teeth and fragments of mandibles, with an occa-
sional long bone. From these bits, however, it may be inferred that there
were many genera and species — some already clearly ancestral to the
orang-utan (the giant ape of Borneo and Sumatra), some showing dental
features foreshadowing the African apes, the gorilla and the chimpanzee,
and others displaying dentitions that make them possible ancestors of man.
Meanwhile what of man? It is generally postulated that his separation
from the common anthropoid-humanoid stock occurred at least as early
as the middle of the Miocene period — at a guess, thirteen million years
ago. A strong body of opinion, in which I do not concur, would even go so
far as to derive the humanoid line from a small ground ape which diverged
from the anthropoid stocks back in the Oligocene, before there were any
giant primates. This view is inacceptable to me because man bears in his
molar teeth the pattern of his Dryopithecus heritage and because he mani-
fests more numerous and detailed resemblances to the present great
African apes than can be explained plausibly by convergence or by such a
remote relationship as is implied in the theory of the small Oligocene
ground-ape ancestor.

Geologists generally agree that the uplifting of the Central Asiatic
plateau and the formation of the Himalayas and other encircling moun-
tain chains occurred in the Miocene period. According to one theory this
uplift was accompanied by a desiccation and deforestation of the elevated
regions which left the ancestral generalized anthropoids under the neces-
sity of migrating to some area where the forests were intact or of taking
to the ground. Whether our ancestors made a virtue of a necessity by
adopting a terrestrial life because there were no more trees or whether they
took a chance on the ground out of sheer initiative can be argued but not
proved. It may be noted that arboreal life, so advantageous for small
primates, becomes a very cramping and precarious existence when an

488 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

animal attains the body bulk of man and the great anthropoid apes.
Firstly, the struggle against gravity increases with increments of weight.
The orang-utan or gorilla is forced to keep to the larger boughs and the
trunks of the trees and cannot flip lightly from the terminal branches of
one tree to the next as does the gibbon. Big anthropoids must move slowly
and cautiously, testing out the strength of branches before entrusting their
weight to them. They have to waste a good deal of energy trying not to
fall out of the trees. Again, tree life provides a sufficient diet for a small
primate but the two-hundred-pound ape has rather lean pickings. He has
to devour vast quantities of fruits and roughage in order to keep going at
all and spends most of his life in a vain pursuit of his appetite.

Is it then incomprehensible that a giant primate, endowed with some-
what more courage and initiative than his fellows, should have taken a
chance upon the ground? There a fall means merely getting up again,
there food is infinitely more plentiful and varied, there progress is a matter
of putting one foot in front of another instead of a precarious climbing
from bough to bough, which gets one nowhere but out on the end of the
limb. Zaccheus of the biblical story showed great perspicacity in climbing
a tree but greater intelligence still in that he chose the auspicious moment
in which to come down.

Here and then was the crucial event of primate evolution — the trans-
formation of a tree-dwelling ape into a terrestrial biped. When our
anthropoid ancestor took to the ground alternatives of posture and locomo-
tion were offered him. The first was quadrupedal progression, the habitual
gait of the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the orang-utan when they leave
the trees. This habit would have involved a loss of the free use of the fore-
limbs and might even have necessitated a re-development of the snout as,
seemingly, in the dog-faced baboons. Such a choice might have resulted in
our continuance as apes. Erect posture, on the contrary, offered every pos-
sible advantage, except that of stability. Moreover our anthropoid forbears
were probably already adjusted for the upright position by their previous
habit of suspending the body from the arms in brachiating and by climbing
up and down the trunks of trees. It has even been suggested that our
arboreal line may have been somewhat deficient in arm development, so
that its members were not efficient brachiators.

At any rate a series of far-reaching anatomical adaptations was necessary
before man attained his present efficiency in standing, walking and running
as an "erect and featherless biped." In the first place his center of gravity
had to shift to a position above the supporting hind limbs— a result effected
naturally by erecting the trunk. In order to accomplish this straightening
of the body axis, the spine had to be bent in its free region between the

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 489

rib cage and the pelvis. Thus originated the lumbar curve, a concavity of
the vertebral column in the small of the back which converts the spine into
a graceful sigmoid shape and incidentally gives rise to innumerable back-
aches. Then, since the entire body weight was now transmitted to the hind
limbs through the pelvis, the form of the latter had to be modified to serve
this purpose, and so changed also as to provide suitable surfaces for attach-
ment of the muscles which balance the body in the upright posture. To
dispense with technical detail, it may be said that the pelvis was broadened
and flattened from a funnel to a basin shape. The legs became enormously
elongated and strengthened in accordance with the new demands made
upon them as the exclusive organs of support and locomotion. But the
most radical changes occurred in the foot, which had to be transformed
from a mobile prehensile member, much like a hand, to a more stable and
rigid organ. Apes and monkeys can oppose their great toes (which pro-
trude inward like thumbs) to the tips of their long outer digits. Such a
movement is essential for the encircling foot grasp of boughs. It is quite
useless for a flat-footed walker. The great toe was brought into line with
the long axis of the foot and converted into a main point of pedal support.
The outer toes, no longer used for grasping, were shortened. The tarsus,
originally composed of loose and mobile bones like those of the wrist, was
molded into a springy vault of wedge-shaped elements. The heel bone
was prolonged backward to give more leverage to the great calf muscles
which lift the body to the balls of the feet in walking. Thus originated the
makeshift organ we call the human foot, with its easily broken down
arches and its vestigial outer toes. It is essentially human; it serves its
purpose more or less efficiently; but it is rarely beautiful and usually looks
like a mutilated slab terminating in degenerate digits like external vermi-
form appendices.

Other bodily changes consequent upon the assumption of the erect
standing posture include a flattening of the chest, a broadening of the
shoulders, a slight shortening of the arms and a refinement of the hands
for skilled manual movements — especially an elongation and perfected
opposability of the thumbs. A great transformation was wrought in the
face. The protruding snout, already regressive from the transfer of its
major function to the hands in prehuman primates, continued to shrink
back, particularly in the region of the teeth, as these dental elements
became reduced in size because they were no longer needed for defense, for
offense or for the tearing of tough food. All these duties were assumed by
the hands and subsequently by the sharpened tools or weapons the hands
created and manipulated. Partly as a result of dental shrinkage, the chin
was left outthrust and the soft tip of the nose was protruded in degener-

490 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

ative exuberance. An esthetic ape would shudder at the human face,
which proclaims itself a product of regressive evolution and atrophy of
function. But the most remarkable change of all was effected in a prodi-
gious swelling of the brain and its skeletal envelope. The forehead, pre-
viously non-existent, swelled up into a bulbous arch; the whole vault of
the skull rose like an inflated bladder, bulged laterally and protruded
posteriorly into a bun-shaped occiput. . . .

During the Pliocene period, which lasted at least six million years and
terminated with the onset of the glacial epoch, perhaps a million years
B.C., it seems certain that our ancestors, who now deserved the name of
man, flourished like the green bay tree. Unfortunately we have as yet no
skeletal remains of human beings which can be attributed with certainty
to this early period. We know, however, that before its close man had
already begun to make stone implements, somewhat crude and amorphous
but definitely recognizable as human artifacts. The elements of material
culture had been formed. Social organization may well have existed.
Anatomical evidence suggests that a number of different physical types of
man were present, some more apelike than others but all essentially
human, and that several of the types were possessed of such ability to
dominate their physical environments as to ensure survival through the
rigors of the ensuing glacial epoch.

The million-year Pleistocene or glacial period witnessed four advances
of the ice sheets with three genial climatic intervals of varying duration in
terms of scores of thousands of years. Throughout this whole period we
have nearly continuous records of man's stone work in the gravel deposits
laid down by rivers and in the inhabited caves. Flint-working evolved
slowly to a pitch of skill which can be appreciated only if one attempts to
produce similar tools from the same refractory material.

Geological deposits of the earlier and middle portions of the Pleistocene
have yielded occasional skeletal remains of man, for the most part frag-
mentary, but enormously instructive. All these men seem to have been
erect walkers, with feet fully adapted for support. Some had rather small
brains, low foreheads, great bars of bone above the eye sockets, protrusive
jaws and receding chins. Such anatomical reminders of ape ancestry did
not prevent them from fabricating a great variety of stone tools, efficient
and, in many cases, symmetrical to the point of beauty. Low brows did
not preclude the clear development of family life around the hearth of cave
habitations, or the reverent burial of the dead, with funeral gifts that sug-
gest belief in a future life. At least one of these Early Pleistocene beings,
the Piltdown Lady of England, had a noble forehead and a brain of
modern size.

MISSING LINKS 491

Before the end of the glacial period, perhaps 25,000 years ago, anatom-
ically modern types of men were dwelling in the caves of Europe and
were decorating the walls of their abodes with realistic polychrome frescoes
of the animals they hunted. These men of the Old Stone Age also carved
statuettes of their lady friends or their mother goddesses — rather frank
representations of Rubensian females. They had invented a number of
skillful devices used in fishing and hunting. They were almost civilized
and altogether human.

Missing Links

JOHN R. BAKER

I AM DEAD, THE CHANCE THAT MY BONES

will become fossilized is very remote. Bones decay away like the
rest of our bodies unless a lot of very unlikely things happen. First of all,
a dead body will not leave any permanent remains in the form of a
fossil unless it happens to be covered up and thus protected from decay.
That is fairly easy in the case of animals in the sea. Rivers are always
carrying sediment out and depositing it, and tides and currents shift the
sediment and cover up the bodies of dead animals. But even in this case
it is by no means likely that the bones will be fossilized. Much more
probably they will gradually dissolve away and leave no trace of them-
selves. Fossilization is rather a complicated process. It involves the replace-
ment of each particle of bone, as it dissolves away, by a less soluble and
therefore more permanent substance. When that has happened, the chances
are still very remote that anyone will find the fossil thousands or millions
of years later. Our quarries and mines and cuttings are mere scratches
on the surface of the earth. With terrestrial animals the chances of
fossilization are still less than with marine ones. They are likely to die
and decay without being covered up. It would be quite absurd to look with
any great hopefulness for the fossil remains of the ancestors of any given

492 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

animal. It would not simply be like looking for the proverbial pin in a
haystack, for then you are supposed to have the advantage of knowing
that the pin is there. But in this case you are looking for a soluble pin in
a haystack in a thunderstorm, and you always have at the back of your
mind the disconcerting thought that perhaps it is no longer there.

That is the reason why we cannot describe the evolution of every species
of animal in detail. The obvious thing to do is to study those animals
which happen to have left the best record of their evolution. The horse
is the best of all. We know the stages in the evolution of the horse in
great detail, and with certainty. There are many other animals whose
evolution from simpler forms is also well known. But if you take any
animal at random, say a rabbit, the chances are that there will not be a
complete fossil history of it.

One would not expect, then, to be able to find much in the way of
human fossils, and the fact is that not many have been found. But we are
in a very different position now from what we were at the beginning of
the century.

At that time very little was known. A fossil skull had been found in a
cave at Neanderthal in Prussia. This was definitely human, but had
many ape-like characters. The enormous bony ridges above the eye are
the most obvious features. Then there is the retreating forehead, receding
chin, and massive jaw; and the form of the leg bones of this type of
person shows that he must have shuffled along with his knees bent all
the time. A cast of the inside of his skull gives a good idea of what his
brain must have been like, and one can see from it that the parts of the
brain concerned with speaking were poorly developed.

Now in the last century people did not like the idea of being descended
from apes, and they were not prepared to examine the evidence for it
impartially. They invented an excellent excuse for this skull. It was an
abnormality! Tha>; would get out of the difficulty. The unfortunate
individual had some disease which made his skull grow in that funny
way. A little peculiar, was it not, that hundreds of thousands of his
relatives, who of course had skulls exactly like ours, left no fossil remains,
while just the single one who happened to be abnormal was fossilized!
But improbabilities do not worry people who have convictions based on
prejudice and not on love of truth. Some people even suggested that
these skeletons were those of hybrids between men and apes. This is
incredible for two reasons. Firstly, no cases are known of any two Mam-
mals, so widely separated as to fall into different families, being able to
interbreed. Secondly, even if one imagined the impossible, and supposed

MISSING LINKS 493

that such hybrids could be produced, it would remain incredible that
the millions of normal men of those geological times should have left
no trace whatever, while the few hybrids were by a miracle fossilized and
discovered.

How has the famous Neanderthal man fared in our enlightened
twentieth century? Many more skeletons have been found, closely resem-
bling him. Neanderthal man has been found in Belgium, France, and
Gibraltar, and in 1925 near the Sea of Galilee. With the skeletons are
examples of his implements, which differ from those of other fossil men,
and implements like these have recently been found in Mongolia. His was
an enormously widespread race of primitive men, every one of them
having those very characters which our learned and truth-loving forbears
preferred to think of as due to disease.

In 1921 a fossil skull, without lower jaw, was found in Rhodesia. This
had huge bony ridges above the eyebrows, and in most respects was
rather like the Neanderthal man, but a little more primitive. We must
hope for more examples of this race.

These Neanderthal men were fairly recent, as geological time goes,
and also definitely more human than ape-like. They were probably not
on the direct line of our ancestry, but died out perhaps twenty-five thou-
sand years ago, just before the last ice age. Nevertheless they must have
been closely allied to our ancestors.

Now what about the real missing link, something midway between
ape and man? Where did we stand at the beginning of the century?

A most momentous discovery had recently been made. Dubois had set
off to the East Indies with the avowed intention of finding a fossil ape-
man, and, miracles of miracles, had actually found one in Java, after
excavating for two years in Sumatra. It was sadly incomplete — just the
top of a skull, a leg-bone and some teeth — but what was there was an
amazing link between man and apes. If Neanderthal man's forehead
may be said to recede, Java man's is almost non-existent, for his head
slopes almost straight back behind his huge eyebrow ridges. His brain
must have been about half-way in size between the brain of a gorilla
and the brain of a man, yet he must have been about as tall as modern
man. Here we have a very primitive man, or a very man-like ape, call
it which you will, who existed — as the geology of the place shows — at
about the time of our first ice age, perhaps half a million years ago.

That was rather a shock for the nineteenth century, and there was
some attempt to discredit Dubois. Unfortunately for the disbelievers,
however, the fossil bone was subjected to microscopical examination and
proved beyond doubt to be genuine.

494 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

Since then there have been thrilling discoveries of intermediates be-
tween apes and men. I must pass over a lower jaw found near Heidelburg
in Germany in 1907, although it is extremely interesting, simply because
it is only a jaw. Four years later some workmen were digging gravel at
Piltdown in Sussex, when a fossil human skull was discovered. This was
a priceless specimen. One feels that one would have sacrificed a hand or
an eye to preserve this treasure so that it could be examined by an expert.
What happened? Workmen, ignorant of its importance, broke it up and
threw the pieces into a rubbish dump. By extreme good fortune Mr.
Dawson had been on the look out for pre-human remains in the district
for some time, as he had found peculiar flints among the gravel, and
someone gave him one of the fragments. We must thank Providence for
putting Mr. Dawson there, for he had the dump most carefully searched,
and many of the fragments were found. Experts then set to work to
consider how they should be fitted together, and different experts had
different ideas.

The main conclusions are the following. There are scarcely any bony
eyebrow ridges at all, and the forehead rises quite steeply above the eyes.
This is most surprising in such an ancient skull, which is probably not
very much more recent than the Java skull. But associated with this skull
there was a lower jaw which is to all intents and purposes that of a
chimpanzee. Many experts considered that it was an extinct chimpanzee's
lower jaw. The complete absence of chin and the huge canine teeth
supported that view. These canine teeth must have interlocked with
those of the upper jaw like a dog's. Now if we regard the jaw as belong-
ing to the skull, then we have a splendid missing link. But if they do not
belong to one another, then the find is not nearly so significant.

That is why the recent discoveries near Peking are so tremendously
important, for now an essentially ape-like lower jaw has been found in
the same lump of rock as part of an essentially human brain-case, and
the Piltdown skull and lower jaw are thus confirmed as belonging to
one individual.

The story of the Peking discoveries is most interesting. During the war
China started a geological survey, and got a Scandinavian, Dr. Andersson,
to direct it. Dr. Andersson discovered rich fossil beds about forty miles
from Peking. A great deal of excavating was done, but no human remains
brought to light. One day one of the Chinese workmen was overheard
asking a companion why they were wasting their time hunting for fossils
in that particular place, when there were far more about half a mile
away. That chance remark altered the course of our knowledge of man's

MISSING LINKS 495

ancestry, for the site of excavation was changed, and shortly afterwards
human remains began to be found.

The first discoveries were two teeth, but there was nothing very special
about these. Then in 1927 another tooth was discovered, which was sent
to Dr. Davidson Black in Peking for examination. It was by no means
by chance that Dr. Black was in Peking. Years before he had taken the
Professorship of Anatomy at Peking, simply because he thought it likely
that pre-human remains would be found in China, and he wanted above
everything to carry out research on this subject.

Careful measurement of this tooth convinced Dr. Black that it was
intermediate between a human and an ape's tooth. He exhibited the
specimen widely, but it was received with scepticism.

A year later part of a jaw was found, and in the same piece of rock
part of a skull. I have referred to that already. You will remember the
jaw was essentially an ape's jaw, and the skull essentially human. Not
only were these two bones found in the same block; they were both
obviously of a young individual. There cannot be any doubt that they
belong together, and they confirm the lesson taught by the Piltdown
skull, that man retained the chinless condition of his ancestors till rather
a late stage of evolution, when he had already got a large brain-case. Dr.
Black was now enabled, by a grant from the Rockefeller Trustees, to
devote full time to research. Discoveries were coming thick and fast, for
in 1929 a momentous discovery was made by a Chinese geologist, Mr.
Pei. Mr. Pei found an almost complete brain-case, quite uncrushed. Mr.
Pei sent it to Dr. Black, and Dr. Black spent weeks in freeing it carefully
from the rock in which it was embedded. Dr. Black has now described
the skull, and casts of it have been made.

Other finds have been made since. Altogether parts of about ten people
have been found. The geological age of this primitive race must have been
about the same as that of the Java man.

What are the essential features of the skull? Does it resemble Piltdown
man closely? In one respect it certainly does not. There are large eye-
brow ridges. The forehead is receding, and in this respect also it resembles
Java man. In one way, however, it is like the Piltdown skull. If you put
a finger on your head just above your ear, and move it across the top of
your skull and down to the other ear, you will find that your skull is
smoothly curved. This Peking skull is not smoothly curved like that. It
has a distinct bump on each side opposite the part of the brain which
is used for understanding spoken words, and another bump opposite the
part concerned in using hand and eye together. This seems extremely
significant. It looks as though man was just beginning to speak and use

496 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

tools. As his brain swelled in the appropriate places, so his brain-case
enlarged unevenly. This curious feature closely resembles one of the
reconstructions of the Piltdown skull. Otherwise the brain was small,
as we should expect in a missing link. Certain parts of the skull are very
ape-like, especially the bones round the base of the ears, and of course
the lower jaw was absolutely chinless and ape-like.

Let me summarize. Perhaps half a million years ago man was in a
very ape-like condition, as shown by the Java, Piltdown, and Peking
skulls. His brain-case was smaller, and his brain was just swelling in those
regions which are concerned with speech and the use of tools. His skull
was thick. His lower jaw was absolutely ape-like. These are the three
missing-link skulls, though the term is, of course, no longer suitable.
Then, ages later, we have a large number of skeletons and tools from
various parts of Europe and Asia which belong to the Neanderthal type.
This race much more closely resembles modern man. The chin is still
small, though the lower jaw is by no means ape-like. The heavy over-
hanging eyebrow ridges and retreating forehead are persistent marks of
the beast. Neanderthal man was probably fairly closely allied to a not
very remote ancestor of ourselves.

You can find casts of some of the skulls and lower jaws to which I
have referred in many museums. In the Natural History Museum in
South Kensington they are in the room to the right as you enter. If you
can find a skull of one of the aborigines of Australia in a museum any-
where, you will find it interesting to compare it with a European's, for it
is primitive in many ways. Notice the small brain-case and the large eye-
brow ridges and the receding forehead. The hairy Australian natives are
the most primitive people living on the globe to-day.

*933

The Popol Vuh

THE CREATION OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN
TOLD BY THE QUICHES

ALL WAS IN SUSPENSE, ALL WAS CALM AND SILENT;
all was motionless, all was quiet, and the broad expanse of the
skies was empty. There was not a single man, no animal, no birds,
no fishes, no crayfish, no wood, no stone, no bogs, no ravines, no
shrubs, no marshes; only the sky existed.

The face of the earth had not yet appeared; only the peaceful sea
and the open space of the skies. There was nothing that clung to
anything else; nothing balanced itself, nothing made the least move-
ment, nothing made a sound in the sky. There was nothing which
could stand; there was only the calm water, the quiet sea, solitary
within its own limits; for as yet nothing else existed.

There was only immobility and silence in the shadows of the night.
Alone too were the Creator, the Dominator, the Serpent covered with
plumes, those who gave birth, those who gave being, alone upon the
waters like a spreading light. Enveloped in green and azure, the greatest
wisdom was in their soul. It is then that the word came to the Lord, to
Gucumatz, in the shadows and in the night. And they spoke together;
they consulted together and meditated together; then they understood
each other and their words and their counsel were joined together.

Then the day came and at the moment of the dawn, man appeared
while they held counsel on the production of the groves and the climb-
ing vines, on the nature of life and humanity — there in the shadows
and in the night through Him who is the Heart of the Sky, who is
called Hurakan. The Dawn is the first sign of Hurakan; the second is
the flashing of the light; the third is the thunder which knocks; and these
three are the Heart of the Sky.

Then they came to the Lord, to Gucumatz; and held counsel on the
life of civilization — how the seeds should be formed, how the light of

497

498 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

civilization should be produced, and who should be the sustainers and
upholders of the life of the gods.

"Let it be done," they said, "let the waters draw back and cease to
cover the earth, in order that land may exist here, that it shall become
hard, and show its surface, so that it may produce, and that the light of
day may shine in the heavens and on the earth; for we shall receive
neither glory nor honor from all that we have created and formed, until
there is on the earth, a human creature, a creature endowed with reason."

So they talked together while the land was formed. In this way the
earth was created: "Earth," they said, and immediately it was formed.
It was like a fog or cloud in the formation of its material state, when like
lobsters the waters began to spread; when, in an instant, the great moun-
tains were formed.

Only by great strength and supernatural power were they able to do
all that was done in the mountains and the valleys, together with the
creation of the groves of cypress and pine which appeared on them. So
Gucumatz was filled with joy. "Thou art the welcome one," he cried
out, "O Heart of the Sky, O Hurakan, O Flashing of the Light, O
Thunder that knockethl"

"All that we have created, all that we have formed, will have its end,"
they replied.

First the earth, the mountains and the plains were formed; the course
of the waters was divided; the streams wound between all the moun-
tains; in this way all the waters existed, when the great mountains were
unveiled. So the creation of the earth was accomplished by those who
are the Heart of the Sky and the Heart of the Earth; for these were the
names of those who first gave life to the heavens and to the earth, still
inert, still suspended in the middle of the waters. Such was its creation,
while they meditated on its fulfillment and its composition.

Then they gave life to the animals of the mountain, who are the
guardians of all the forests; to the beings who inhabit the mountains,
the deer, the birds, the tigers, the serpents, the viper and the quanti,
the guardians of the forest.

Then he who created them, who gave them being spoke, "Is it there-
fore to remain silent; is it to live without movement that there is shade
in the woods and in the shrubs? It is good, therefore, that there should
be other beings to guard them."

So they talked, while they impelled the creation, while they worked
together; and immediately, the deer and the birds came into being. Then
they gave to the deer and to the birds their homes.

"Thou, O deer, thou wilt sleep on the borders of streams and in the

THE POPOL VUH 499

ravines; it is there that thou wilt rest in the brushwood and the shrubs;
you will multiply in the woods; you will go on four feet." And it was
done as they had said. Then at the same time the little and the big homes
of the birds were made. "You, O birds, you will live in the tops of the
trees, on the tops of the bushes." So they spoke to the deer and to the
birds, while they did all they had to do, and all took to their homes and
their nests. In this way the Creator gave a place to live to all the animals
of the earth.

When all was finished, the deer, and the birds, the voice of the Creator
and the Lord, of him who gave being was heard.

"Feed and graze now, since the power to feed and graze has been
given you; make your language understood, each according to his kind,
each according to his nature; so they spoke to the deer, to the birds, to
the lions, to the tigers and to the serpents. Speak then our name, honor
us, your father and mother; call then upon Hurakan, the Flashing of the
Light, the Thunder which Knocks, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of
the Earth, the Creator and the Former, He who gives birth, and He who
gives being; speak, call upon us, and salute us." Thus was it spoken unto
them.

But it was impossible for them to speak like men, for they could only
chatter and cluck and croak; without showing any kind of language,
each according to his kind, murmuring in a different way. When the
Creator and the Former understood that they could not speak, they spoke
again with one another; "They cannot utter our name, although we are
their creators and their formers. This is not good," they repeated among
themselves, He who gave birth, and He who gave being.

And they spoke to the animals, "You shall be modified, for it is im-
possible for you to speak. We have therefore changed our word; your
care and your nourishment, your bushes and your habitations — these
you will have; they will be the ravines and the woods; but our glory
is not perfect for you do not call upon us. There will be other beings
who will salute us, who will obey us. Now do your work. As for you,
your flesh will be 'broken under the tooth!' Thus shall it be. Such is
your destiny." In this way they spoke to them, and at the same time, they
told these things to all the big and all the little animals that were on the
face of the earth.

But they wished to try their luck again; they wished to make a new
attempt, to bring together a new form of worshipper. So all the animals
on the face of the earth were reduced to being eaten or killed. It became
necessary that a new race of creatures be made by the Creator and the
Former, by Him who creates, by Him who gives being.

500 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

"Let us try again; already the time of the harvest is approaching; the
dawn is about to appear; let us make those who will be our sustainers
and our upholders. How shall it be that we may be called upon and
that we may be remembered on the face of the earth? We have already
tried with our first work, our first creatures; they could not salute, they
could not honor us. We shall try now to make men who will be obedient
and respectful to us, who will be our strength and our nourishers."

Then the creation and the formation of man took place; of moist earth
they made his skeleton. But they saw that it was not good; for it was
without cohesion, without consistence, without movement, without
strength, inept and watery; he could not shake his head, his face turned
only in one direction; his sight was veiled and he could not see behind;
he had the gift of language, but he had no intelligence; and immediately
he was swallowed in the waters.

The Creator and the Former spoke once again, "Let there be an intelli-
gent being," they said, and in that instant a wooden mannikin was
formed. These new men made their way in the world, they reasoned
and they meditated. They lived and they multiplied; they gave birth
to sons and daughters, mannikins made of wood; but they had no heart,
no intelligence, no memory of their Former and their Creator; they led
a useless existence and lived like animals. Therefore, they were destined
to be destroyed — this race of experimental men. At first they spoke, but
their faces dried up; they had no blood, no substance; only their dried
up cheeks showed in their faces; their feet and their hands were dry; their
flesh was languishing. They no longer thought of lifting their heads
toward the Creator and the Former, their father and sustainer. These
were the first men who lived in great numbers on the face of the earth.

At last the end of these men came — the ruin and destruction of these
mannikins made of wood who were put to death. The waters of the
earth were swollen by the will of the Heart of the Sky; a great flood cov-
ered the heads of these mannikins, of these beings made of wood. As
they were drowning, a heavy resinous rain fell from heaven. The bird
Xecotcovach tore out their eyes; the bird Camalotz devoured their flesh;
the bird Tecumbalam bruised and broke their bones and sinews; their
bodies were reduced to powder and scattered far and wide. For they
had not thought of their father, He who is the Heart of the Sky, whose
name is Hurakan; therefore the face of the earth grew dark and a dense
rain began to fall, rain by day and rain by night.

Then all the animals, great and small gathered together; all that had
served them spoke, their pots and cooking utensils, their plates, their
dogs, their chickens — "You have dealt badly with us; you have bitten

THE POPOL VUH 501

us; in your turn you will be tormented," said their dogs and their
chickens.

And then the metates spoke in their turn, "We were tormented by you;
daily, daily, by night as by day, always, holt, holi, huqui, huqui^ grinding
our surfaces for your sake; this we have suffered from you. Now that
you have ceased to be men, you will feel our strength; we shall bite you
and reduce your flesh to powder."

And this is why their dogs, speaking in their turn, said to them: "Why
did you not give us anything to eat? You hardly looked at us and you
chased us out and followed us; the object which you used to strike us is
now ready, while you eat your meal. We were unable to speak then;
but why did you not reason, why did you not think? It is we who will
destroy you, and now you will swallow the teeth that are in your jaws;
we shall devour you," the dogs said as they tore the unhappy images
with their teeth.

And this is how their cups and their dishes talked in their turn, "Pain
and misery you brought to us, smoking our tops and our sides; forever ex-
posing us to the fire, you burned us until we could no longer feel any-
thing.

"You will feel it in your turn and we will burn you now." Likewise
did the stones which had served to make the fireplace, as they asked that
the fire be lighted under the outstretched heads of the unhappy manni-
kins for the evil which they had done.

Then the men began to run hither and thither, filled with despair.
They wanted to go to the roofs of the houses, but the houses crumbled
and fell to the earth; they wanted to climb to the tops of the trees, but
the trees hurled them from them; they wanted to enter the caverns, but
the caverns closed before them.

Thus the ruin of this race of human beings was accomplished, men
who were destined to be destroyed and overthrown. And it is said that
their descendants are the little monkeys who live in the woods today;
only the monkey remains because their flesh was made of wood by the
Creator and the Former.

This is why the little monkey resembles man — a sign that he is of an-
other generation of human beings who were only mannikins, only little
men made of wood.

Lessons In Living from the Stone Age

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON

Ol LIGHTLY LESS EMBARRASSING THAN OWNING TO A

^ philosophy of life is confessing that you have some idea, though
vague and changing, as to what constitutes the good life. My ideas of it
come chiefly from a comparison between civilization and primitive culture.

I feel that when Shaw intentionally speculates in his T$ac\ to Methuse-
lah on the good life in coming millenniums he describes unintentionally
the lives of some groups of our ancestors during millenniums of the
remote past. For Shaw pictures the nearly ideal condition of the future in
a way that has little relation to civilization as we find it about us to-day
but which is reminiscent of a great deal that we call the lowest sav-
agery. . . .

My party of one white and three "Americanized" western Eskimos
reached the Stone Age Eskimos of Coronation Gulf in late winter, travel-
ing by sledge in a manner to which the local people were accustomed.
We wore fur garments similar to their own, and gave the impression of
being not foreign, though strangers. We were able to converse from the
first day; for Eskimo is one language from Greenland to Bering Sea
across the northern frontier of the New World.

In culture the Gulf Eskimos went back not thousands but tens of
thousands of years; for they were just emerging from the age of wood and
horn into the earliest period of stone. They knew that certain berries and
roots could be eaten, although they did not consider them as real food,
but only as a substitute for food in an emergency. Their proper diet was
wholly animal tissues. Through two-thirds of the year it was chiefly seal,
with an occasional polar bear. During the summer they lived mainly on
caribou, with some fish. There was no clothing except from the skins of
animals. The tents were of skin and so were the boats. There were
kayaks, the small boats used for hunting; there were none of the large
skin boats in which other groups of Eskimos travel. The only domestic
beast was the dog, and he was mainly a hunting animal. There was usually

502

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE 503

not more than one dog for each hunter; so that, although the dogs were
hitched to sledges in traveling, there were so few of them in comparison
with the people that essentially the Eskimos themselves were the draft
animals.

The Coronation Eskimos knew of the Bear Lake forest but did not
like it as a country to live in and made journeys to it only to secure tim-
ber for sledges, tent poles, and for a few other uses. They considered the
treeless prairie north of the forest the best possible land in summer, and
they considered the ice of the gulf and strait a proper and desirable home
in winter. They were satisfied, then, with both their country and their
climate, believing that any change would be for the worse.

These Stone Age people considered not only that the one proper food
is meat but also that the most delicious things in the world are the pre-
ferred parts of animals. They had the highest average of good health which
I have ever found in any community of like size; most of the deaths among
them came from accident or old age. They had a religion by which they
believed themselves able to control their environment; but it was a religion
neither of hope nor of fear. There was no permanent future life; there was
nothing resembling heaven or hell. The spirits were powerful but they
were not in themselves good or evil, though they might do the good or
evil bidding of men or women who controlled them — this Stone Age
attitude toward spirits was something like the modern attitude toward
explosives or steam power: things neutral in themselves but capable of
being used for good or ill. They had as much desire to live as any of
us but less fear of dying than most of us have.

Of the seven hundred or so Stone Age people about two hundred had
been in contact with whaling ships for a few days each of two years,
1906-7 and 1907-8. Our visit to them was in 1910. There were a dozen or
less who had seen David Hanbury when he passed along the southern
edge of their district in 1902. Another dozen had seen for an hour or two
at close range some Slavey Indians a few years before our visit, and of
course they had seen groups of them frequently at a distance. But at
least four hundred had never heard the noise which gunpowder makes
when it explodes or seen the lighting of a match. They had seen pieces of
cloth and believed them to be skins of animals. They had received many
guns by tribe-to-tribe trade, but had secured them only when the neigh-
bor groups had run out of ammunition. They hammered and cut up the
guns to make things which they wanted, such as knives, spear points,
and especially needles.

When we first lived with these people they envied us greatly just one
thing we had with us, our sewing needles. Among themselves the most
valuable single possession was a dog. I purchased a dog for a large knife,

504 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

worth about three dollars at American wholesale prices. Later that day the
man returned with the knife and with a second dog — if I would take the
knife back he would give me two dogs for one needle. They explained
that, although they had seen the Eskimo woman member of our party
sewing before we made the first trade of the knife for the dog, they had not
then realized that she possessed two needles. Now they understood that
she had not only two but several, and she had told them that, with my
consent, she was willing to give up one.

We inquired and found that by local standards a No. i size sewing
needle was worth much more than any knife and was well worth, in the
common estimation, two good dogs. So we made the trade.

The point of the trading story is that these Stone Age Eskimos were as
yet not discontented with their copper knives, although they had been
familiar for decades with the better iron knives which they themselves
had made through Stone Age technic from rifle barrels and other pieces of
iron. But they were far from content with their copper needles, for the
shafts were necessarily stout in comparison with the size of the eye, which
made it difficult to sew a waterproof seam.

Waterproof sewing is apparently one of the early discoveries of man.
There may not be any people on earth to-day except the Eskimos who
still remember how to make, and do make, a really waterproof seam. For
most or all other sewers rub grease into a seam to waterproof it, or use
some trick of that sort; but the women of the Stone Age Eskimos con-
sidered it an insult if they saw anybody rubbing grease on the seam of a
water boot which they had made. However, in spite of their skill, water-
proof sewing was difficult with the use of a copper needle; but it was
easy with one of our steel needles.

Perhaps we have gone too far already before saying that we have no
thought of deriving the health, happiness, and other details of the good life
of the Copper Eskimos from their backward state — from their being still
thousands of years behind us in technological development. We are
merely trying to sketch briefly, and without any necessary causal rela-
tion, how these people lived who were to all appearances so much happier
than any other people whom I have ever known.

We were the first of European civilization to live with these Eskimos,
and we saw during the first year the gradual, and later rapid, increase of
discontent — which was a decrease of happiness. Discontent grew not
always along lines that might have been expected. For instance, you
would think that our matches would have been coveted, but this was not
the case. Their method of lighting fires by knocking together two pieces
of iron pyrite had advantages which to their minds (and even to mine later

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE 505

on) compensated for the disadvantages. Certainly a match is handier for
a cigarette; also for lighting a fire in good weather our matches were
better. The advantage of the pyrite we discovered when we had to kindle
a fire in a gale or in a rainstorm. It came to be our practice when we
traveled with the Stone Age people to light fires with matches in good
weather and to borrow their technic when the weather was bad. Then
another advantage of pyrite was of course that two pieces of it, each the
size of a lemon, would last you for years, if not for a lifetime. Nor did
you have to worry about keeping these lumps of rock dry.

The Stone Age people had been discontented with their needles before
we came. The first discontent after that was connected with the insect
pests. They had never conceived of a mosquito net that would protect
your face during the day and that might be used to cover your bed at
night. As first they considered our face nets and bed nets frivolous. But
after a few weeks of association they began to say what a fine thing it
would be if a white trader should come in with enough mosquito nets so
that everybody could buy one.

There were also the black flies. Eskimo garments are loose, somewhat
as if the coat were a Russian blouse and the trousers in the style of our
pajamas. Besides, in the heat of the summer, with temperatures sometimes
running above 90° in the shade, they practically had to have rents and
holes in their skin clothing. Through these holes, up their sleeves and
down their necks would crawl the black flies as if they were fleas, sting-
ing so that the hurt was greater than the itch. Against these pests we wore
knitted cotton shirts and drawers, with long arms and long legs, the
elasticity making them tight and flyproof round the wrist and ankle. A
longing for this kind of underwear to use in summer was perhaps the
basis of the second of the new discontents.

There grew slowly through the first summer an appreciation that a cloth
tent was better than one of skins — lighter, less bulky, and less difficult to
preserve from decay. It was not until perhaps the second or third year
that there was any real discontent with the bow and arrow for caribou
hunting and a desire for rifles. The appreciation of the value of fish nets,
as compared with spears and hooks, developed somewhat more rapidly
than the longing for guns. During the first few years of Copper Eskimo
association with Europeans there was no discontent on the score of diet.
The local conception was, as said, that meat is real food and that things
like cereals and vegetables are makeshifts.

The picture of Stone Age life which we have begun to sketch might not
seem attractive to the reader even if we could spread it over a large canvas

506 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

with the details completely presented. We endeavor to bring out our mean-
ing in part by making a contrast between the Copper Eskimos of 1910
and those of 1939.

Perhaps the only thing with which the Coronation people are still con-
tent is their climate. You cannot describe to them the weather of Hawaii
or California in such terms as to get a more favorable reply than that no
doubt Europeans like that sort of thing but they themselves would never
like it. They still prefer boiled meat to any imported food; but they now
feel ashamed if they do not have, especially for visitors, a few of the
costly imports to offer, among them tea, coffee, sugar, salt, bread, and syrup.
They are as discontented now with the sewing machines which they own
as they formerly were with the copper needles. They are less content with
the best rifles they can get than they were with their bows and arrows.
They still enjoy their own songs most, but they feel a social need of phono-
graphs, and there is a developing need for the radio. They know that their
skin clothes are best for the climate, but fashion has laid such hold upon
them that they must have clothes of silk and other materials.

In 1910 they believed in keeping up with the Joneses. In this they used
to be approximately successful; for under their communistic anarchy
everyone shared the best of the foods and the best of all materials. There
was scarcely any difference between garments except that one woman
could make a more attractive dress than another out of a given material,
or a man correspondingly could make a slightly superior bow or spear.
To-day keeping up with the Joneses wears a different aspect. Formerly in
that contest they had no problems which we classify as economic; now
they compete, or want to compete, in things which are beyond their eco-
nomic reach, some of them known through hearsay but not obtainable in
their country.

The breakdown in native economy, and thereby in self-respect, is more
easily described, at least so far as my own experience goes, from the
Mackenzie River district, several hundred miles to the west of the Copper
Eskimos.

Mackenzie habits of life began to change with the entrance of the
New England whaling fleet in 1889. I arrived there in 1906. Between that
year and 1918 I saw much change; the rest to date is known to me from
dependable reports.

Comparing the reports of Sir John Franklin with what I saw a hundred
years later, I would conclude that two thousand delta people had decreased
in a century to less than two hundred. The chief cause was measles, one
epidemic of which, in the memory of those still living, had killed some*
thing like two out of three within a few weeks. Tuberculosis had been

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE 507

rare or absent; now it was prevalent. Digestive troubles had been few,
but now they were common. Tooth decay had been unknown, but now
their teeth were as bad as ours. There is no reasonable doubt that in 1820
the Mackenzie people, then in the Stone Age, were on the average as
healthy as my Copper Eskimos were in 1910; but when I reached the
Mackenzie district in 1906 the average Mackenzie health was probably not
better than that of our worst slum districts.

The Mackenzie people, however, were not living under a slum level
of poverty in 1906. They still had their economic independence and the
respect which goes with it. How this later broke down can be shown by
the story of Ovayuak, who still held to the old ways of life and who
was still a heathen.

Steamers come down the Mackenzie River in midsummer, usually arriv-
ing at Macpherson during early July. The first steamer brought the Bishop.
It was known among the converts in the Mackenzie district that the Bishop
wanted to see them on his annual pastoral visits. The people liked the
Bishop, they wanted to purchase goods that had been brought by the
steamer, and they enjoyed the outing of the two-hundred-mile trip south
to the Hudson's Bay post. So they streamed to Macpherson in late June.

But, said Ovayuak, the Bishop's visit came in a fishing season. Not being
a convert, he stayed behind and fished all summer with his family and a
few who still took their lead from him. Most of the others went to meet
the Bishop and the traders. By the time the religious ceremonies, the feast-
ing, and the trading were completed and the return journey made to the
coast, the fishing was nearly over.

But that was only part of the difficulty. The trader had said to the
Eskimo husbands that they ought to dress their wives in the best possible
garments. When the reply was that the Eskimos had nothing with which
to pay, tire trader said that he knew them well, that they were reliable,
that he would be glad to trust them, and that they could take as much
cloth as they wanted, paying him next year.

However, when the cloth had been sold the trader would give these men
a talking-to of another sort. He would remind them that now they were in
honor bound to pay for the goods a year later. They must not, therefore,
spend all their time down on the coast fishing and gorging themselves;
they would now have to go up into the forest or to certain promontories
on the coast so as to catch the mink of the woodland or the white foxes
that frequent the shore floe. These would now have to be their chief con-
cern; for they were pledged to see that the dealer should not suffer through
having trusted them.

Accordingly, said Ovayuak, when the people returned from their sum-

508 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

mer visit to Macpherson they would explain to him that they had made
promises not to stay very long at the fishing but to go to the promontories
or the forest in time to be ready for the trapping season. And, said
Ovayuak, naturally he could not argue against this; for, like them, he
believed that a promise ought to be kept. So most of the families would
scatter for the trapping districts, leaving him and his few adherents still
at the fishing.

Ovayuak told me this just after the New Year. He forecast that when
the midwinter days began to lengthen, visitors would begin to arrive.
The trappers would now be running short of food and they would say to
one another, "Let us go to Ovayuak; he has plenty of fish."

Sure enough, they began to gather. At first we took them into our
house, where twenty-three of us had been living in one room; but that
accommodation could not be stretched for more than ten extras. So the
others had to pitch tents or to build snowhouses in the neighborhood of
our cabin. The stores of fish that seemed inexhaustible began to melt
rapidly. There was not merely a steady increase of people; they all had
their dog teams to feed, also.

Everybody went out fishing every day, we locals and the visitors, but we
caught perhaps only one-tenth as much as was being consumed. This went
on till the fish store was nearly gone. Thereupon everybody who had a
sledge loaded it heavy with the last of the fish and then we scattered in all
directions, to hunting and fishing districts. We went in small detachments,
for it is a principle of the hunting life that you must not travel in large
groups.

The system which I watched breaking down under the combined
influence of Christianity and the fur trade was on its economic side com-
munism. Natural resources and raw materials were owned in common,
but made articles were privately owned. The blubber of a seal that was
needed for light and heat, or lean and fat that were needed for meals,
belonged no more to the man who secured them than to anyone else.
A pair of boots belonged to the woman who made them until she
presented or sold them to somebody else. A meal that had been cooked
was in a sense private property, but it was open to everyone under the
laws of hospitality — it was very bad form to start a meal in any village
without at the least sending a youngster outdoors to shout at the top of
his voice that the family were about to dine or breakfast. If the houses were
scattered and the people indoors, then messengers, usually children, would
be sent to every household. People would come and join the family at their
meal, either because they wanted the food or else for sociability. If the

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE 509

house was too small to accommodate everybody, then portions of cooked
food were sent out to the other houses.

It is a usual belief with us that this type of communism leads to shift-
lessness. But that was certainly not the case in any Eskimo community
known to me so long as they still followed the native economy.

Among the Eskimos of northern Canada there was no law except public
opinion. Although no one had authority, each person had influence accord-
ing to the respect won from a community which had intimate knowl-
edge of everybody. Nobody was supposed to work if he was sick; and still
the permanently handicapped were expected to work, each according
to his ability. Among the Copper Eskimos, for instance, I saw a man of
about forty who had been blind since childhood. He was one of the most
cheerful and constant workers, but naturally could do only a few special
things.

It has been a part of European ethics that a debt of honor should be paid
before other debts. Thus a debt which could not be collected through legal
machinery was a heavier obligation than one which had behind it the
penalties of the state. With the Stone Age Eskimos every debt was a debt
of honor; for there were no police, judges, prisons, or punishment.

The same force which compelled the Eskimo to pay his debts compelled
him to do his share of the work according to his recognized abilities. I
never knew even one who didn't try his best, although there were of
course the same differences of energy and aptitude which we find among
ourselves. If there had been a shirker he would have received the same
food; but even in a circle of punctilious courtesy he would have felt that
he was not being fed gladly. It is nearly impossible, when you know how
primitive society works under communistic anarchy, to conceive of any-
one with the combination of indolence and strength of character which
would make it possible for a healthy man to remain long a burden on
the community.

In the few cases where strength of character is enough for running
against public opinion the issue is seldom or never on any such low plane
as that of indolence. I have known one situation where a man was con-
demned to death. For there was no punishment among the Stone Age
Eskimos except the disapproval of the community or death — nothing in
between.

We may now summarize those things in the Stone Age life which we
judge make for happiness more than do the corresponding elements of
our own civilization :

510 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

The successful man stood above his fellows in nothing but their good
opinion. Rank was determined by the things you secured and turned
over to the common use. Your importance in the community depended on
your judgment, your ability, and your character, but notably upon your
unselfishness and kindness. Those who were useful to the community,
who fitted well into the community pattern, were leaders. It was these men
who were so often wrongly identified by the careless early civilized traveler
and the usual trader as chiefs. They were not chiefs, for they had no
authority; they had nothing but influence. People followed their advice
because they believed it to be sound. They traveled with them because
they liked to travel with them.

There was of course the negative side. If you were selfish you were
disliked. If you tried to keep more than your share you became unpopu-
lar. If you were persistently selfish, acquisitive, and careless of the general
good you gradually became too unpopular. Realizing this, very likely you
would try moving to another community and starting life there over
again. If you persisted in your ways and stayed where you were there
would come a period of unanimous disapproval. You might survive for
a year or even a few years as an unwanted hanger-on; but the patience of
the community might at any time find its limit, and there would be one
more execution of a troublemaker.

Because few understand the workings of a communistic anarchy it is
necessary to insist that most of the supposed difficulties which fill our
theoretical discussions of communism and of anarchy do not arise in
practice.

Under the communism we are describing you don't have to accumulate
food, apart from the community's store; for you are welcome to all you
reasonably need of the best there is. You do not have to buy clothes; for
they will be made for you either by some woman member of your family
or by some woman friend who will feel about your wearing a coat of hers
just the way any number of our women feel when they see their men
friends wearing a garment they have knit or a tie they have sent as a
Christmas gift. You do not have to accumulate wealth against your old
age; for the community will support you as gladly when you arc too old to
work as it would if you had never been able to work at all — say because
you had been blind from infancy.

One common arrangement of ours, however, is useful under commu-
nism, though not quite as necessary there as under rugged individualism.
It is a good thing to have a family, for your children and grandchildren
will look after you even more thoughtfully than mere friends.

The nearest thing to an investment among the Stone Age Eskimos,

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE 511

the one means of providing against old age, is children. For that reason
a widow without a child would have to be loved for herself alone. A widow
with one child would be a desirable match. To marry a widow with
three or four children was, among the Stone Age people of Coronation
Gulf, the New York equivalent to marrying the widow of a millionaire.

On the basis of my years with the Stone Age Eskimos I feel that the
chief factor in their happiness was that they were living according to the
Golden Rule.

It is easier to feel that you can understand than to prove that you do
understand why it is man gets more happiness out of living unselfishly
under a system which rewards unselfishness than from living selfishly
where selfishness is rewarded. Man is more fundamentally a co-operative
animal than a competitive animal. His survival as a species has been
perhaps through mutual aid rather than through rugged individualism.
And somehow it has been ground into us by the forces of evolution to be
"instinctively" happiest over those things which in the long run yield the
greatest good to the greatest number.

My hope for the good life of the future, as I have seen it mirrored from
the past by the Stone Age of northern America, does not rest wholly on a
belief in cycles of history. It rests in part on the thought that a few more
decades or centuries of preaching the Golden Rule may result in its
becoming fashionable, even for the civilized, to live by the Golden Rule.
Perhaps we could live as happily in a metropolis as in a fishing village if
only we could substitute the ideals of co-operation for those of competi-
tion. For it does not seem to be inherent in "progress" that it shall be an
enemy to the good life.

*939

Racial Characters of the Body

SIR ARTHUR KEITH

From Man: A History of the Human Body

IF I WERE TO DECLARE OPENLY THAT THIS IS NOTHING
more or less than an attempt to expound the "Principles of Physical
Anthropology," I fear that I should turn my readers away with the
declaration that they do not wish to know anything of a subject which
has such a forbidding title. The subject, however, is really not uninterest-
ing, and the reader will be surprised to discover he knows much more
of it than he is aware. Modern commerce and our world-wide enterprise
have brought all the races of the earth as visitors to our shores. We see
them plentifully in our great seaports, and even in the most remote
country villages we have now and then an opportunity of making their
acquaintance. It is on those occasions we discover that we do know
something of Anthropology — or Ethnology as it is sometimes named.
How otherwise did we recognize that the stranger who drew the eyes
of the village on him was a Chinaman, a Red Indian or a Negro? If,
however, we are asked how we knew, we find we are not quite certain,
and that our knowledge of the subject is rather subconscious. Those
who study the bodily characters of the varieties of mankind are seeking
to make this subconscious knowledge into a system of well-defined facts
to which the name of Physical Anthropology is given. We collect these
facts not only to ascertain how one race differs from another in structure
of body, but we have a larger aim in view, we wish to know how and
when the earth became populated with a diverse humanity.

It is always well to begin our study at home. When we see a regiment
in full dress march past we recognize it as the "Suffolks," the "Gordons,"
the "Connaughts," or the "Welsh Fusiliers," as the case may be. When,
however, the soldiers file silently past, dressed alike in a fighting uniform,
without a number or a badge, can we distinguish the nationality ? I doubt
if one could, and I hold the opinion that, however many racial stocks

512

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY 513

have been planted from time to time within the bounds of Britain, the
condition at the present day is such that we cannot tell — except from
speech, temperament or local mannerisms — whether a given batch of men
are English, Scotch, Welsh or Irish. It is possible that the professed
anthropologist, by making a series of measurements as regards height*
proportion, and shape of head, and other observations on colour of skin»
and eyes and hair, could tell the part of the country from which each
batch came. Our difficulty lies in the fact that in every county we sec
that there are many types of body and face and many shades in the
colour of hair and skin. It is true that in some counties certain types
prevail and other types are uncommon, while in other counties these
same types occur in an opposite proportion. At the present time there
is a tendency to suppose that a pure race is made up of individuals having
the same form of body, and that, if within the bounds of a country or
of a county several types are found, there has been a mixture of races in
that country or county in past times. Such an opinion seems quite
reasonable, especially when we remember how many invading peoples
have settled in Britain from first to last. When, however, we begin to
survey even the purest human races we find within their communities
just as great a variety of bodily form as is to be seen in any part of
Britain. Nay, I am quite certain that the reader can recall families in
which some were tall and some short, some dark and some fair, some
with a narrow face and some with a wide face. The existence of numer-
ous types and varieties inside even the purest race is a most important
fact, for it is easy to see how the characters of the race might be changed
if certain types flourished and increased in numbers, while other types
were gradually repressed and ultimately disappeared. So far as we know
there is no selection of any special type in progress in Britain.

If, however, we were to pick a man from the streets of Strassburg,
and set him side by side with the first man we met in Nottingham, we
should probably see the two chief types of mankind in Western Europe.
We have nothing to do with the national spirit, the speech, the hair-
dressing and tailoring which mark the one off from the other; these
are of the greatest importance, but they are outside the bounds of
physical anthropology. The colour of hair and complexion of skin, hue
of eye, may be the same in these two individuals drawn from towns
so far apart; their faces may be of the same type; it is probable, however,
that the Englishman's face is the longer and narrower. Their stature
may be the same — possibly the Englishman is the taller by about half an
inch, but not heavier. The form of head, however, is totally different.
When we take the length and breadth of the Englishman's head we shall

514 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

probably find that its breadth is between seventy-four and seventy-six
per cent, of its length, or if we wish to give our knowledge a learned
turn we say that his "cephalic index" is between seventy-four and
seventy-six. In the Strassburger's head the cephalic index is probably
between eighty and eighty-two. When we look at his head in profile it
appears as if it had been compressed from back to front, so that the
width of the head has been increased and the brain pushed forwards,
thus coming to occupy a more anterior position above and in front of
the ears. The height of the head is increased. The Englishman's head has
been compressed from side to side and rather flattened on the top, so that
it does not appear to be so high as the German head. We find then that
the best mark to distinguish the typical Englishman from the typical
German is the shape of the head. It must not be forgotten, however, that
in Nottingham, as in Strassburg, there are all forms of heads, but the
rounded type prevails in the one and the long type in the other. It is
possible, but very unlikely, that two individuals, selected by chance, may
have the same types of head.

If we estimate the capacity of the skull in these two selected types of
man, we shall probably find that in size of brain chamber they are about
equal, each containing from 1,480 to 1,500 cubic centimetres of brain.
When, however, the reader asks me why the head is long in one and
round in the other, I must confess that no satisfactory answer can be given
to the question at the present time. We know, however, that the head
is artificially and grossly distorted in infancy by many races of mankind
— indeed the custom was once common in Europe — without producing
any marked mental change. The brain also suffers a change in shape in
those cases of distortion, but travellers have noted that the men with the
altered heads are just as intelligent as those whose heads have escaped
constriction. The brain seems to work as well in one shape of skull as in
another. As a matter of daily experience we have no reason to think that
the round-headed man is more capable than the long-headed, and yet
when we come to trace the history of long-headed races in Europe we
meet with facts which give matter for thought.

If we make a survey of modern Europe we find the long-headed
races scattered along her western shores — in Norway, in Britain, in those
parts of Denmark, Germany and Holland which flank the North Sea;
in Spain, and to a less degree in parts of France and Italy. Round-
headed peoples dominate the great central region of Europe. If, however,
we go back 5,000 years and examine the graves of that remote period, we
obtain a different picture of head and racial distribution in Europe. The
German, the Swiss, the French graves of that time contain the bones

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY 515

of men who were of the long-headed type; we must suppose them to
represent the people of the country at that period. We know from history
and from tradition that waves of round-headed races have pressed west-
wards and southwards in Europe, and all the evidence goes to show that
these waves issued from that part of Europe now included in the Russian
Empire. We know, too, that an advance guard of the round-head invasion
reached our shores some 4,000 years ago, when bronze was the metal
employed by civilized races. Graves of these people have been found from
Yorkshire to Kent, and in Scotland. They were conquerors and yet they
could not save their head-form; in the course of generations the round
head merged in the long, not perhaps without some effect on our modern
head-form. We have every reason to think, then, that in Europe the round
head is the prevailing type. Indeed, had it not been for the discovery of
America and of Australia the long-headed type of European would have
been sparsely represented in the "modern world.

We now set out to enquire which of these two types of head, the round
or the long, is the older or more primitive. We turn first to the anthro-
poid skull to see in which mould it is cast. In the adults we find that the
shape of the essential part of the skull — the part which contains the
brain — is masked by a great bony framework which was formed during
the years of youth to give attachment to the muscles of mastication. We
must, therefore, measure the skulls of the young, and in them we find
the breadth amounts to eighty per cent, or more of the length of the
skull. The anthropoids are round-headed, especially the orangs. When
we look more closely we see that the roundness of the anthropoid head
is altogether different in character from the roundness of the modern
European head. We see at once that the anthropoid's skull is wide,
because the width is increased at the price of height; it gives the impres-
sion of having been compressed from above downwards into a bun-
shaped form, the width being thus increased and not the length. The
apparent compression of the human skull is rather from behind forwards
as in round-headed races of men, or from side to side, as in long-headed
races. Thus we cannot say that the round type of human head is more
anthropoid than the long one.

When, however, we examine the skulls of the most ancient men yet
discovered, the evidence is very definite; all of them have the long form
of head. In the oldest and most primitive type yet found — the fossil man
of Java — the breadth of the skull is seventy-two or seventy-three per cent,
of the length; he is long-headed. We note in this skull, however, a very
remarkable feature — it is flattened or compressed from crown to base, as
we have seen to be the case in anthropoid skulls. In another very ancient

516 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

skull from Gibraltar we notice this anthropoid character and also that the
breadth is seventy-four per cent, of the length. In the Neanderthal race,
which lived in Europe during the glacial period, the head is also of the
long type, and indeed the length of their skulls is much above the modern
average. The Cro-Magnon race, which came long after the Neanderthal
and yet were inhabitants of France before the glacial period had closed,
were remarkably long-headed. The oldest man yet discovered in England
— the Galley Hill man, who also apparently belongs to the glacial period —
had a remarkably narrow and long head; the breadth is only sixty-nine
per cent, of its length. From all these facts we must conclude that the
long head is the older type. Indeed, all the evidence points to the round
form of skull we have seen in the citizen of Strassburg as a comparatively
recent product in the evolution of human races. The evolution of the
form of human skull seems to have taken place in the following order.
The anthropoid skull, short, wide, flat, seems to be the oldest form. In
the early human stock it became long, moderately wide, and flattened;
later it became long, narrow, and high, and lastly short, wide, and high.
We have been comparing opposite types of head-form, and we now
propose to contrast the most widely divergent types of mankind. As one
of these we select again the man from Strassburg, premising that he is
of the short-headed or brachycephalic type, with blond hair, blue eyes,
and a fair clear skin. Beside him we propose to place, for purposes of
contrast, a negro from the heart of Africa. Here I would beg of the
reader to break away from the common habit of speaking and thinking
of various races as high and low. When we meet the native of the Congo
in his home we find that he does not share our opinion that we are of a
superior race and type; indeed, his candid opinion is the reverse. High
and low refers to civilization; it does not refer to the human body. When
we have placed a Central European and a Central African side by side,
we see before us the end stems of the two most divergent branches of
humanity. They are equally old in type, and we may truthfully say equally
specialized. We believe they have arisen from a common stock, but that
must be a million of years ago or more. The mere diversity of their bodily
features indicates an evolutionary period of great length. We note the
difference in their head-form; the negro has a long narrow head; its
cranial capacity is less, and on the average the brain is simpler in its
pattern. It is the difference in colour that impresses us most. In the negro
the skin and eyes are laden with black pigment, which is being con-
stantly absorbed and constantly renewed. Even the deeper parts of the
body show scattered patches of pigment. In the Central European there
are pigment granules in the skin, but the skin must be cut in fine sections

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY 517

and examined with the microscope before they are plainly visible. The
contrast in colour in the two types is so great that it seems scarcely
credible that we are dealing with the same species of being. Indeed, there
are many who maintain that they belong to different species. Yet we
know that intermixture of these two types produces children which in
turn are fertile for generation after generation.

When, too, we cross from Central Europe to Central Africa, we see
that these two extreme types of mankind are linked together by all the
intervening shades between fair and dark. In Southern Europe the skin
and hair become more pigmented; in Northern Africa the skin is dark
brown or black. Whenever we find an intermediate series which carries
us from one extreme to the other, we believe that those extremes may
have arisen from a common stock. We see, too, how the inhabitants ot
the same country or even of the same parish, may show many shades
of pigmentation — but for each country there is a certain average, and
the variation in shade is bounded by definite limits. When we wish to
explain why the Central European is fair and the Central African is
black, we are brought at once to a dead stop by our ignorance. We do
not know what service pigment performs in the human body. We cannot
suppose it to be a useless substance. It is true that it is most developed in
those who live in hot climates, yet the ancient Tasmanians, the natives of
a very temperate climate, were black. There is no definite proof that
negroes become less black in temperate countries, nor that fair men
become more pigmented in tropical lands. Yet it seems most reasonable
to suppose that the pigment of the skin does protect the body from
certain rays of the sun.

Anthropologists have always presumed that the primitive human stock
must have been dark-skinned. Certainly the degree of pigmentation seen
amongst the great anthropoids lends support to this theory. The gorilla
is black; there are various races or varieties of chimpanzee, and all of them
show a degree of black pigmentation. In one variety the skin becomes
totally black; in another, pigmentation of the face and of other parts
is delayed until late in life; in others the face never becomes absolutely
black. The skin of the orang is also deeply pigmented, but the black
granules are masked by the presence of a red element. The evidence
supplied by anthropoids points to a common stock with dark pigmented
skins. It is very possible, however, that in the progress of evolution, the
degree of pigmentation has somewhat increased in the pure negro races,
while in the Central European it has become greatly diminished. One is
led to form such an opinion from the skin colour of the natives of
Australia. They have so many primitive features in the structure of their

518 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

bodies that it is also possible that their skin colour is likewise primitive.
Their skins are not so deeply pigmented as in the typical negro. On the
whole, the evidence points to the stock from which human races have
arisen as having had brown pigmented skins. The very black African
and very fair European races may represent comparatively recent
products in the evolution of modern races.

We must return to the consideration of the African and European
types of mankind now standing before us. We shall admit, I think, that
in character of skull and of brain, and in colour of skin, the negro shows
the older type, but in the character of his hair this is not so. The woolly
hair, coiled naturally into little isolated locks, is unlike the hair of ape
or man. It is a feature of the negro or negroid races, and was evolved
with them. The straight black or wavy brown hair of the European
appears to be more primitive in character. There are two other features
of the negro's face which appear to be specializations or departures from
the primitive type. The thick everted lips are very different from the
thin straight lips of the anthropoid apes. The thin European lips seem a
more primitive type, and yet when sections are made of the lips of
Europeans and Africans certain features are seen which make us hesitate
to endorse this opinion. Then, again, there are the characters of the
forehead. It is true that in the West Coast of Africa we meet natives
with prominent supraorbital ridges and receding foreheads. In the
typical African negro this is not the case; the forehead as a rule is high,
narrow, often prominent or bulging, and the supraorbital ridges are
moderately or slightly developed — distinctly less prominent than in the
European. There is not a shadow of doubt that the stock from which
modern man is descended had great supraorbital ridges. They are still
to be found in a fairly primitive form in native Australians, but to see
them at their best one must examine the skulls of those ancient Euro-
peans— the Neanderthal race. In the gorilla especially, and also in the
chimpanzee, these supraorbital ridges form prominent bony ledges or
shelves above their sunken eyes. The typical negro is destitute of great
supraorbital ridges, which are primitive features.

When we compare the negro and European nose it may be a question
as to which is the more primitive. Neither the one nor the other is like
the nose of the anthropoid, and yet of the two, the sharp, narrow, prom-
inent nose of the European, with its high bridge and compressed wings,
must be admitted to be the more specialized type. If, however, we leave
the Congo Valley and make our way to Egypt along the Valley of the
Nile, we shall meet with various negro tribes in whom the nose is
narrow and prominent and almost European in shape.

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY 519

We have reason to believe that the shape of the nose does depend to
a considerable degree on the development of the teeth and jaws. A long,
prominent and narrow nose is usually part of a face in which the palate
is narrow or contracted and in which the jaws have grown in length
rather than in width and strength. In the ancient inhabitants of Europe
we find the jaws and teeth well and regularly developed and the nose of
fair width. In modern Europeans, especially in those with long heads,
we find a tendency to an irregular development of the jaws and to an
elongation and narrowing of the face, with the result that the nose also
is rendered sharper and more prominent. The jaws and cheeks have
retreated and left the nose as a narrow prominent organ on the face of
the typical European. In Central Africa we find other tendencies at
work; the teeth are big, white, and regularly set in well-developed jaws.
The face is broad rather than long. The jaws may be so well grown as
actually to give the individual the appearance of having a muzzle. The
nose is correspondingly flat and wide. In brief, I conceive it possible that
the nose of the negro might assume a European form were his teeth and
jaws to undergo those changes which are apparently occurring amongst
the civilized peoples of Europe and America.

There are other features of the body we ought to contrast in the
European and African — the longer forearm and leg of the latter, the
absence of calf and longer heel, the different type of ear, but enough has
been said to give some idea of the chief bodily features in which one
race of mankind differs from another.

In Eastern Asia we find another distinctive type of modern man. We
may take the Chinaman as a representative and place him with the Cen-
tral European for comparison. They are both short-headed or brachyce-
phalic, but their heads are essentially different in shape. The Mongolian
head is really round or ball-shaped. The skin is pigmented — less so than
in negro races, but more so than in European. The hair is strong, lank
and black. The stature is short — perhaps two inches less than in the
European, the shortening being due not to a diminution in length of
trunk so much as to a shortening of the legs. In size of brain there is
nothing to choose between the two types. The chief difference lies in the
face. The cheek bones are prominent, the teeth good, and the jaws strong
in the Chinaman, but we note at once that the supraorbital ridges are
less developed than in the European. In this the Mongol resembles the
negro, but his forehead is wide, not narrow as in the negro. The essential
Mongolian feature is the nose — its low sunken bridge over which one
eye can almost see its neighbour. With the depression of the nose a
peculiar fold of skin — the epicanthic fold — is drawn like a curtain above

520 FROM APE TO CIVILIZATION

the inner angle of the eye. The eyes seem set at an oblique angle, a
feature which Chinese artists love to emphasize. The Mongolian face,
when compared with the European, is remarkably flat and shield-like.
The forehead, the prominent cheek bones, the sunken nose and well-
developed jaws all take a part in forming this facial plateau.

Thus we find contrasted types of man have been evolved at divergent
points or centres of the old world — in Europe, in Africa, in Asia. When
we remember that the skulls and limb bones of the inhabitants of Egypt
have changed remarkably little during 5,000 years we must conclude that
evolution amongst human races does not proceed quickly. One finds the
same form of skull among Englishmen of to-day, as occurred in the men
who lived in Britain many thousands of years ago. If then, we believe in
evolution, it becomes evident that the well marked differences which
characterize the races of Europe, Asia, and Africa, must be the result of
a very long period of time.

79/2

B. THE HUMAN MACHINE

You and Heredity

AMRAM SCHEINFELD

From You and Heredity

LIFE BEGINS AT ZERO

A SPERM AND AN EGG: YOU, LIKE EVERY OTHER HUMAN
being and most other animals, began life as just that.

A single sperm enters a single egg and a new individual is started on its
way.

Leaving aside for the present the part played by the mother, we know
that a father's role in his child's heredity is fixed the moment that it is con-
ceived. Whatever it is that the father passes on to his child must be con-
tained within that single sperm.

But to find out exactly what that sperm contains has not been so simple
a matter.

Consider, first, its size:

One hundred million sperms may be present in a single drop of seminal
fluid. Two billion sperms — two thousand million, as many as were needed
to father all the people in the world today — could be comfortably housed
in the cap of a small-sized tube of toothpaste!

The microscope had to be well perfected before a sperm could be even
seen. Then, in the first flush of discovery, carried away by their desire to
believe, just as children and lovers imagine that they see a man in the
moon, some scientists (circa 1700 A.D.) reported excitedly that every sperm
contained a tiny embryonic being. With professional gravity they gave it
the name of "homunculus" (little man), and scientific papers appeared
showing careful drawings of the little being in the sperm — although there
was some dispute as to whether it had its arms folded or pressed against
its side, and whether or not its head had any features.

Presently, however, it became apparent that imagination had run away

522 THE HUMAN MACHINE

with scientific perspicacity. The head of the sperm — in which interest
rightfully centered, as the tail was merely a means for propelling it —
proved to be a solid little mass that defied all attempts at detailed study.
Even the great Darwin, who was so right about many things, could never
more than guess at what the sperm head comprised — and his guess was a
wrong one. Many scientists thought it was hopeless to try to find out.
Others concluded that if the sperm head itself could never be dissected
and its contents examined, they might still find out what it carried if they
could learn what happened after it entered the egg. And in this they were
right.

Crowning years of painstaking study, we know at last that what a hu-
man sperm carries — the precious load that it fights so desperately to de-
liver— are twenty-four minute things called chromosomes.

When the sperm enters the egg, and penetrates its substance, the head
begins to unfold and reveal itself as having been made up of the twenty-
four closely packed chromosomes. As they represent everything that enters
the egg, we know beyond any doubt that these chromosomes must com*
prise all the hereditary material contributed by the father.

What of the egg? Although many thousands of times larger than the
sperm, the egg is yet smaller than a period on this page, barely visible to
the naked eye. Under the microscope we see that it consists largely of
foodstuffs with the exception of a tiny globule, or nucleus. What that con-
tains we see when the sperm head enters the egg and releases its chromo-
somes. Almost at the same timef the egg nucleus breads up and releases its
twenty-four similar chromosomes — the contribution of the mother to the
child's heredity.

Thus, the new individual is started off with forty-eight chromosomes.

In order to reveal the otherwise colorless chromosomes special dyes have
to be applied. When this is done, they appear as colored bodies. Hence
their name "chromosomes" (color-bodies).

But almost immediately another remarkable fact becomes apparent. We
find that the chromosomes are of twenty-four different kinds as to shape,
size, etc., with one of each kind contributed by each parent.

These forty-eight chromosomes comprised all the physical heritage with
which you began your life.

By a process of division and redivision, as we shall see in detail later,
these initial forty-eight chromosomes are so multiplied that eventually
every cell in the body contains an exact replica of each and every one of
them. This is not mere theory. If you were willing to lend yourself to a
bit of dissection, an expert could take some of your own cells and show
you the chromosomes in them looking just about like those described here.

YOU AND HEREDITY 523

As we viewed them up to this point, the chromosomes are in their com*
pressed form. But at certain times they may .stretch out into filaments ever
so much longer, and then we find that what they consist of apparently
are many gelatinous beads closely strung together.

These beads either are, in themselves, or contain the "genes? and it is
the genes which, so jar as science can now establish, are the ultimate fac-
tors of heredity. Under the most powerful magnification, differences are
apparent among these chromosome sections in size, depth of shading, and
patterns of striping. But whether or not differences are revealed to the
eye, we \now beyond any question that each gene has a definite function
in the creation and development of the individual.

Of all the miraculous particles in the universe, one can hardly conceive
of anything more amazing than these infinitesimally tiny units. We say
again "infinitesimally tiny'* for want of another and better expression.
Think of the microscopic size of a sperm. Then recall that the head of a
sperm alone contains twenty-four chromosomes. And now consider that
strung in a single chromosome might be anywhere from scores to hun-
dreds of genes — with a single gene, in some cases, able to change the whole
life of an individual!

To grasp all this you must prepare yourself for a world in which minute-
ness is carried to infinity. Contemplating the heavens, you already may
have adjusted yourself to the idea of an infinity of bigness. You can read-
ily believe that the sun is millions of miles away, that stars, mere specks
of light, may be many times larger than the earth; that the light from a
star which burned up six thousand years ago, is reaching us only now;
that there are billions of stars in the space beyond space which our most
powerful telescopes cannot yet reveal. This is the infinity of bigness out-
side of you.

Now turn to the world inside of you. Here there is an infinity of small-
ness. As we trace further and further inward we come to the last units of
life that we can distinguish — the genes. And here with our limited micro-
scopes, we must stop, just as we are stopped in our exploration of the
stars by the limitations of our telescopes. But we can make some pretty
good guesses about what the genes are from what we already know about
what they can do.

You believe the astronomer when he tells you that, on October 26, in
the year 2144, at thirty-four minutes and twelve seconds past twelve o'clock
noon there will be a total eclipse of the sun. You believe this because time
and again the predictions have come true.

You must now likewise prepare yourself to believe the geneticist when
he tells you that a specific gene, which cannot yet be seen, will neverthe-

524 THE HUMAN MACHINE

less at such and such a time do such and such things and create such and
such effects — under certain specified conditions. The geneticist must make
many more reservations than the astronomer, for genetics as a science is
but a day-old infant compared to astronomy, and the genes are living sub-
stances whose action is complicated by innumerable factors. But despite
all this, so much has already been established about our gene workings
that we must stand in greater awe than ever at this latest revelation of how
fearfully and wonderfully we are made.

THE ETERNAL GERM-PLASM

No less important than knowing what heredity is, is knowing what it is
not. Before we examine the chromosomes and their genes in detail, let us
first find out how the sperms or eggs which carry them are produced in
the parent. That in itself will clear away much of the deadwood of the
past with innumerable false theories, beliefs and superstitions about the
life processes.

Not so long ago the most learned of scientists believed that whatever it
was that the sperms or eggs contained, these were products of the indi-
vidual, in which were incorporated in some way extracts of themselves.
That is to say, that each organ or part of a person's body contributed
something to the sperm or egg. Darwin, a proponent of that theory,
called these somethings "gemmules."

By the "gemmule" theory, all the characteristics of both parents could
be transmitted to the child, to be blended in some mysterious way within
the egg and reproduced during development. A child would therefore be
the result of what its parents were at the time is was conceived. As the
parents changed through life, so would their eggs or sperms, and the
chromosomes in them, also change. All that is what scientists believed not
so long ago, and what the vast majority of people today still believe —
erroneously.

The theory that sperms or eggs change as the individual changes has
now been upset. Because we have learned finally that the chromosomes
which they contain are not new products of the individual and are most
certainly not made up of "gemmules" or contributions from the various
parts of the body.

As we have seen, a human being starts life as just a single cell contain-
ing forty-eight chromosomes. That initial cell must be multiplied count-
less times to produce a fully developed person, and this is accomplished by
a process of division and'redivision.

Continuing in the same way, the two cells become four, the four eight,

YOU AND HEREDITY 525

and this goes on into the billions — the material with which to make the
cells, after that in the egg is exhausted, coming from the mother.

But the cells do not all remain the same, by any means. After the earliest
stages, when they are still very limited in number, they begin "specializ-
ing." Some give rise to muscle cells, some to skin, blood, brain, bone and
other cells, to form different parts of the body. But a certain number of
cells remain aloof. They take no part in building the body proper, and at
all odds preserve their chromosomes unchanged and unaffected by any-
thing that happens outside of them — short of death itself.

These "reserve" cells are the germ cells, dedicated to posterity. It is from
these cells that the sperms or eggs are derived.

When a boy is born, he already has in his testes all the germ cells out
of which sperms will eventually be produced. When he reaches puberty,
a process is inaugurated that will continue throughout his life — or most of
his life, at any rate. In the same way that billions of cells grew from one,
millions of more germ cells are manufactured from time to time by divi-
sion and redivision. Up to a certain point the process is the same as that
previously explained — but just before the sperms themselves are to be
formed, something different occurs. The chromosomes in the germ cell
remain intact and the cell merely splits in half, each half getting only
twenty-jour chromosomes, or one of every pair.

From a parent germ cell with the regular quota of forty-eight chromo-
somes, two sperms are formed, each carrying only twenty-four chromo-
somes. The reason and necessity for this "reduction division" will be ex-
plained presently.

Before we go on, let us stop to answer a question which has undoubt-
edly caused concern to many a man:

"/.$• it true that the number of sperms in a man is limited, and that if he
is wasteful with them in early life, the supply will run out lateri"

No, for as we have seen, the sperms are made out of germ cells thrown
off without decreasing the "reserve" stock. Endless billions of sperms can
continue to be discharged from a man's body (200,000,000 to 500,000,000
in a single ejaculation) and the original quota of germ cells will be there
to provide more — so long as the reproductive machinery functions and the
body can supply the material out of which to make them. (However, dissi-
pation to an extreme point which might injure or weaken the body — and
similarly, disease, accident, or old age — can curtail the production of
sperms, or greatly reduce the number of those that are virile.)

In the female, although the eggs are also manufactured out of germ
cells, the process does not provide for an endless number, running into
billions, as in the case of the sperms. The female, when she reaches puberty,

526 THE HUMAN MACHINE

will be required normally to mature only one egg a month, for a period of
about thirty-five years. So, when a girl baby is born, the fundamental steps
in the process have already been taken, and the germ cells have already
been turned into eggs. In other words, her ovaries at birth contain tiny
clusters of all the eggs (in rudimentary form) which will mature years
later. The chromosomes which she will pass on to her future children are,
however, already present and will not be changed in any way. The matur-
ing process will merely increase the size of the egg by loading it with a
store of food material with which to start a new individual on its way.

Although we can ignore the complicated details of the egg-formation
process, it may be pointed out that before the eggs are formed from the
germ cells there is a "reduction" division, just as there is in the case of the
sperms. This gives each egg, like each sperm, only half of the parent's
quota of the chromosomes. But when the sperm, with its twenty-four
single chromosomes, unites with the egg, with its twenty-four correspond-
ing single chromosomes, the result is an individual with two each of every
chromosome—twenty-four pairs, or forty-eight, the required quota for a
human being.

If that reduction process hadn't taken place, each sperm or egg would
carry 48 chromosomes; on uniting they would start off an individual with
96 chromosomes; the next generation would begin with 192, and so on to
an absurd and impossible infinity. However, this reduction division, it will
soon be seen, has much more than a mathematical significance.

One fact should be constantly kept in mind: Regardless of the differ-
ences in their processes of formation, the sperms or eggs receive chromo-
somes which are replicas of those which the parents themselves received
when they were conceived. Nothing that happened to the body cells of
the parents throughout their lives could have been communicated to their
germ cells so as to alter the genes, or hereditary factors, which their child
would receive.

Does this mean that a gene can never change? No, for a change ("muta-
tion") might take place at rare intervals in any given human gene, either
spontaneously or through some outside influence about which we know
very little. But nothing that we ourselves do can change the mafe-up of
our germ cells.

It is as if, when Nature creates an individual, she hands over to him bil-
lions of body cells to do with as he wishes, and in addition, wrapped up
separately, a small number of special germ cells whose contents are to be
passed on to the next generation. And, because Nature apparently does not
trust the individual, she sees to it that the hereditary factors in those germ

YOU AND HEREDITY 527

cells are so sealed that he cannot tamper with them or alter them in the
slightest degree.

WHAT WE DON'T INHERIT

Men since the world began have taken comfort in the thought that they
could pass on to their children not merely the possessions they had ac-
quired, but also the physical and mental attributes they had developed.

To both types of inheritance, as previously conceived, serious blows have
been dealt within recent years. The passing on of worldly goods has been
greatly limited by huge inheritance taxes in most countries, and abol-
ished (almost) entirely in Russia. As for physical heredity, all preexisting
conceptions have been shaken by the finding we have just dealt with:

The chromosomes in our germ cells are not affected by any change that
ta^es place within our body cells.

What this means is that no change that we make in ourselves or that is
made in us in our lifetimes, for better or for worse, can be passed on to
our children through the process of physical heredity. Such changes —
made in a person by what he does, or what happens to him — are called
acquired characteristics. Whether such characteristics could be passed on
has provided one of the most bitter controversies in the study of heredity.
It has been waged by means of thousands of experiments, and is still being
carried on by a valiant few. But now that the smoke of battle has cleared
away, there remains standing no verified evidence to prove that any ac-
quired characteristic can be inherited.

Reluctantly we must abandon the belief that what we in one generation
do to improve ourselves, physically and mentally, can be passed on through
our germ-plasm to the next generation. It may not be comforting to think
that all such improvements will go to the grave with us. And yet the same
conclusion holds for the defects developed in us, of the things we may do
in our lifetimes to weaken or harm ourselves. If we cannot pass on the
good, we cannot likewise pass on the bad.

Why we can't should now be obvious. Knowing that all that we trans-
mit to our children, physically, are the chromosomes, it means that in
order to pass on any change in ourselves, every such change as it occurred
would have to be communicated to the germ cells and accompanied by
some corresponding change in every specific gene in every specific chromo-
some concerned with the characteristic involved.

Just imagine that you had a life-sized, plastic statue of yourself and that
inside of it was a small, hermetically sealed container filled with millions
of microscopic replicas of this statue. Suppose now that you pulled out of
shape and enlarged the nose of the big statue. Could that, by any means

528 THE HUMAN MACHINE

you could conceive, automatically enlarge all the noses on all the millions
of little statues inside? Yet that is about what would have to happen if a
change in any feature or characteristic of a parent were to be communi-
cated to the germ cells, and thence to the child. It applies to the binding of
feet by the Chinese, to circumcision among the Jews, to facial mutilation
and distortion among savages, to all the artificial changes made by people
on their bodies throughout generations, which have not produced any
effect on their offspring. And it applies to the mind as well.

Nature performs many seeming miracles in the process of heredity. But
it would be too much to ask that every time you took a correspondence
course or deepened a furrow in your brain, every gene in your germ cells
concerned with the mental mechanism would brighten up accordingly.
Or that, with every hour you spent in a gymnasium, the genes concerned
with the muscle-building processes would increase their vigor.

Thinking back to your father, you will see that what he was, or what
he made of himself in his lifetime, might have little relation to the hered-
itary factors he passed on to you.

Remember, first, that your father gave you only half of his chromosomes
— and which ones he gave you depended entirely on chance. It may be pos-
sible that you didn't receive a single one of the chromosomes which gave
your father his outstanding characteristics.

Aside from this fact, what your father was or is may not at all indicate
what hereditary factors were in him. The genes do not necessarily deter-
mine characteristics. What they determine are the possibilities for a per-
son's development under given circumstances.

Thus, your father may have been a distinguished citizen or a derelict, a
success or a failure, and yet this may provide no clear indication of what
chromosomes were in him. But whether or not the nature of his chromo-
somes did reveal themselves through his characteristics, you can make
only a guess as to which of them came to you by studying unusual traits
that your father and you have in common.

You may already be thinking, "What about my children? How much
of myself did I, or can I, pass on to them?"

Let us first see what you can't pass on.

You may have started life with genes that tended to make you a bril-
liant person, but sickness, poverty, hard luck or laziness kept you from
getting an education. Your children would be born with exactly the same
mental equipment as if you had acquired a string of degrees from Yale to
Oxford.

Suppose you are a woman who had been beautiful in girlhood, but
through accident, suffering or hardship, had lost your looks. The children

YOU AND HEREDITY 529

born to you at your homeliest period would be not one whit different than
had you developed into a movie queen.

Suppose you are a World War veteran who was shell-shocked, blinded,
crippled and permanently invalided. // you had a child today his hered-
ity would be basically the same as in one you might have fathered in
your fullest vigor when you marched off to the Front.

Suppose you are old.

The sperms of a man of ninety-five, if he is still capable of producing
virile sperms (and there are records of men who were) would be the same
in their hereditary factors as when he was sixteen. And although the span
of reproductive life in a woman is far shorter than in a man, the eggs of a
woman of forty-five would similarly be no different in their genes than
when she was a young girl.

Nevertheless, there may be considerable difference in the offspring born
to parents under different conditions. But not because of heredity.

Let us take the case of drunkenness. On this point alone endless con-
troversy raged in previous years. Certain experiments were reported as
proving that drunkenness, and other dangerous habits, could be passed on
by heredity. All these "findings" have since been discredited. But you may
ask: "If drunkenness is not inherited, how explain that children of drunk-
ards are so often drunkards themselves?"

The most likely and obvious explanation would be, "through precept
and example."

As often as not, similarities between child and parent (mother as well as
father) , which are ascribed to heredity are really the effects of similar influ-
ences and conditions to which they have been exposed. In fact, so inter-
related and so dependent on each other are the forces of environment and
heredity in making us what we are that they cannot be considered apart.

Thus where heredity may fall down, environment may be there to carry
on. And if you ask, "Can I pass on to my child any of the accomplish-
ments or improvements I have made in myself?" the answer may be,
"Yes! You can pass on a great deal — not by heredity, but by training and
environment!"

The successful, educated, decent-living father can give his son a better
start in life. The athletic father can, by example and training, insure his
child a better physique. The healthy, intelligent, alert mother can insure
her child a more favorable entry into the world, and after it is born, can
influence it for the better in innumerable ways.

There are, however, limits to what environment can accomplish. Exag-
gerated claims made for it in previous years have been refuted by the find-
ings in genetics. The theory of the extreme "behaviorists" that any kind

530 THE HUMAN MACHINE

of person could be produced out of any stock by the proper training, has
been deflated. On the other hand, the extreme "hereditarians" who in the
first flush of discovering the mechanism of heredity attributed every-
thing to its workings, have also been given a setback.

THE MIRACLE OF YOU

What was the most thrilling, perilous, extraordinary adventure in your
life?

Whatever you might answer, you are almost certain to be wrong. For
the most remarkable and dramatic series of events that could possibly have
befallen you took place before you were born.

In fact, it was virtually a miracle that YOU were born at all!

Consider what had to happen:

First, YOU — that very special person who is YOU and no one else in this
universe — could have been the child of only two specific parents out of all
the untold billions past and present. Assuming that YOU had been ordered
up in advance by some capricious Power, it was an amazing enough
coincidence that your parents came together. But taking that for granted,
what were the chances of their having had YOU as a child? In other words,
how many different kinds of children could they have had, or could any
couple have, theoretically, if the number were unlimited?

This is not an impossible question. It can be answered by calculating
how many different combinations of chromosomes any two parents can
produce in their eggs or sperms. For what every parent gives to a child
is just half of his or her chromosomes — one representative of every pair
taken at random. In that fact you will find the explanation of why YOU
are different from your brothers and sisters, why no two children (except
"identical" twins) can ever be the same in their heredity.

Putting yourself in the role of parent, think for a moment of your fingers
(thumbs excluded) as if they were four pairs of chromosomes, of which
one set had come to you from your father, one set from your mother.

Now suppose that these "chromosomes" were detachable and that you
had countless duplicates of them. If you could give a set of four to every
child, and it didn't make any difference whether any "chromosome" was a
right- or left-hand one — in other words, whether it had come from your
father or your mother — how many different combinations would be
possible?

Sixteen, in which every combination differs from any other in from one
to fodr "chromosomes."

But this is with just four pairs involved. If now you put the thumb
of each hand into play, representing a fifth pair of chromosomes, you

YOU AND HEREDITY 531

could produce twice the number of combinations, or 32. In short, as our
mathematician friends can quickly see, with every added pair of factors
the number of possible combinations is doubled. So in the case of the
actual chromosomes, with twenty-four pairs involved — where one from
each pair is taken at random — every parent can theoretically produce
16,777,216 combinations of hereditary factors, each different from any
other in anywhere from one to all twenty-four chromosomes.

Whether we are dealing with the millions of sperms released by a male
at one time, or the single egg matured by a woman, the chance of any
specific combination occurring would be that once in 16,777,216 times.

But to produce a given individual, both a specific sperm and a specific
egg must come together. So think now what had to happen for YOU to
have been born:

At exactly the right instant, the one out of 16,777,216 sperms which rep-
resented the potential half of you had to meet the one specific egg which
held the other potential half of you. That could happen only once in some
300,000,000,000,000 times! Adding to this all the other factors involved, the
chance of there having been or ever being another person exactly like you
is virtually nil.

At this point you might say, with modesty or cynicism, "50 what?"

Well, perhaps it wasn't worth all the fuss, or perhaps it wouldn't have
made any difference whether or not YOU were born. But it was on just
such a miraculous coincidence — the meeting of a specific sperm with a
specific egg at a specific time — that the birth of a Lincoln, or a Shakespeare,
or an Edison, or any other individual in history, depended. And it is by the
same infinitesimal sway of chance that a child of yours might perhaps be a
genius or a numbskull, a beauty or an ugly duckling!

However, that first great coincidence was only the beginning.

The lucky sperm, which has won out in the spectacular race against
millions of others, enters the chosen egg which has been waiting in the
fallopian tube of the mother. Immediately, as we previously learned, the
sperm and the nucleus in the egg each releases its quota of chromosomes,
and thus the fertilized egg starts off on its career.

Already, from this first instant, the fertilized egg is an individual with
all its inherent capacities mapped out — so far as the hereditary factors
can decide. Will the baby have blue eyes or brown eyes? Dark hair or
blond hair? Will it have six fingers or a tendency to diabetes? Will it live
to nineteen or to ninety? These and thousands of other characteristics are
already largely predetermined by genes in its particular chromosomes.

But as yet the individual consists of only one cell, like the most elemental
of living things (i.e., the ameba). To develop it into a full-fledged human

532 THE HUMAN MACHINE

being, trillions of cells will be required. How this multiplication is effected
we have seen: The chromosomes split in half and separate, then the cell
divides, making two cells, each with exact replicas of the forty-eight
chromosomes that there were in the original whole. Again the process is
repeated, and the two cells become four. Again, and the four cells become
eight. So it continues, and as you could figure out if you wished, the
doubling process would have to be repeated only forty-five times to provide
the twenty-six trillion cells which, it is estimated, constitute a fully devel-
oped baby.

However, as the cells go on to "specialize," some divide and multiply
much more slowly than others. But regardless of how they multiply or
what they turn into, to the very last cell, each one will still carry in its
nucleus descendants of each of the original forty-eight chromosomes.

"BOY OR GIRL?"

Next to being born, the most important single fact attending your
coming into the world was whether you were to be a male or a female.
Undoubtedly, that is the first question that occurs to prospective parents.
Before you read this chapter, you may find it of interest to test your present
knowledge as to what determines sex. Which of these statements would
you say is right, which wrong?

1. The sex of an unborn child can be influenced before or during con-
ception by (a) the stars, (b) the climate, (c) the mother's diet.

2. It can be influenced by other factors within two months after con-
ception.

3. It is the mother who determines the sex of the child.

4. More boys are born than girls because boys are stronger.

5. On an average, as many boys are conceived as girls.

6. A mother's age or condition has no effect on her chances of giving
birth to a boy or a girl.

7. Whether mothers are White or Negro the chances of their baby being
a boy are exactly the same.

Every one of the foregoing statements, you will presently find, is wrong!

The scene is a regally furnished bedchamber, in medieval times.

A beautiful young woman is lying in a luxurious, canopied bed. She is
to become a mother, but although this will not occur for many months,
already there is much to do.

A midwife carefully adjusts her so that she lies on her right side, her
hands held with thumbs out. Over her now a bearded necromancer swings
with precise up-and-down motions a tiny incense-burner. (Heaven forfend
that it be allowed to describe a circle!) At the foot of the bed an abbot

YOU AND HEREDITY 533

kneels in prayer. In one corner an astrologer mumbles incantations as he
studies an almanac. In another corner an alchemist prepares a potion in
which are boiled the wattles of a rooster, some heart-blood of a lion, the
head of an eagle and certain parts of a bull — the essence of all these will
be blended with thrice-blessed wine and given to the young woman to
drink. And meanwhile, surrounded by high counselors, the young
woman's noble spouse — none other than the mighty Sovereign of the
Realm — looks anxiously on.

By this time you have probably guessed that all the ceremonial and
hocus-pocus was for a single purpose: To make sure that the expected
child would be a son and heir to the throne.

Synthetic as this particular scene might be, in effect it occurred many
times in history. But if it were only a matter of dim history we would not
be dealing with it here. The fact is, however, that to this very present day,
throughout the world and in our own country, a fascinating variety of
potions, prayers, midwife's formulas, "thought applications," diets, drugs
or quasi-medical treatments is still being employed by expectant mothers
to influence the sex of the future child. Most often, undoubtedly, the objec-
tive is a boy. But an ample list could also be compiled of the "what-to-do's"
to make it a girl.

Alas then, whatever the methods employed, primitive or supposedly
enlightened, all are now equally dismissed by science with this definite and
disillusioning answer:

The sex of every child is fixed at the instant of conception — and it is not
the mother, but the father, who is the determiner.

The moment that the father's sperm enters the mother's egg, the child
is started on its way to being a boy or a girl. Subsequent events or influ-
ences may possibly affect the degree of "maleness" or "femaleness," or
thwart normal development, but nothing within our power from that first
instant on can change what is to be a girl into a boyf or vice versa.

The solution of the mystery of sex-determination came about through
this discovery:

That the only difference between the chromosomes of a man and a
woman lies in just one of the pairs — in fact, in a single chromosome of this
pair.

Of the twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, twenty-three pairs — which
we could number from A to W, inclusive — are alike in both men and
women. That is to say, any one of them could just as readily be in either
sex. But when we come to the twenty-fourth pair, there is a difference.
For every woman has in her cells two of what we call the "X" chromo-
some, but a man has just one "X" — its mate being the tiny "Y." It is the

534 THE HUMAN MACHINE

presence of that "Mutt and Jeff" pair of chromosomes in the male (the
"XY" combination) and the "XX" in the female that sets the machinery
of sex development in motion and results later in all the differences that
there are between a man and a woman.

We have already seen how when human beings form eggs or sperms,
each gets just half the respective parent's quota of chromosomes. When
the female, then, forms eggs and gives to each egg one chromosome of
every pair, as she has two X's, each egg gets an X. But when the male
forms sperms and the different pairs of chromosomes split up, one chromo-
some to go into this sperm, the other into that sperm, one of every two
sperms will get an X, the other a Y.

We find, then, with regard to the sex factor, that the female produces
only one kind of egg, every egg containing an X. But the male produces
two kinds of sperm — in exactly equal numbers. (Which is to say, that of
the 200,000,000 to 500,000,000 sperms released by a man each time, exactly
half would be X-bearers, half Y-bearers.)

Science having established that only one sperm fertilizes an egg (as a
wall forms about the egg the instant it enters, shutting out all others), the
result should be self-evident. If a sperm with an X gets to the egg first, it
pairs up with the X already there, an XX individual is started on its way
and eventually a girl baby is produced. But should a Y-bearing sperm win
the race, the result will be an XY individual, or a boy.

Here at last is the comparatively simple answer to what was long con-
sidered an unfathomable mystery!

But hardly have we solved this when we are confronted with a new
mystery :

The world has always taken it pretty much for granted that there are
about as many males as females conceived, and that if about 5 or 6 percent
more boys are born than girls this is due to the "fact" that boys are stronger
and better able to survive the ordeal of being born. The actual situation, as
now revealed by science t is radically different.

All evidence now points to the fact that more boys are born because
more boys are conceived. Why should this be, you may ask, if the "male"-
producing and "female"-producing sperms are exactly equal in number?
Because they are apparently not the same in character. The assumption
follows that the sperm containing the small Y has some advantage over the
one with the X, so that, on an average, it gets to the mark oftener — so
much oftener, various scientists have stated, that the ratio at conception
may be as high as 20 to 50 percent more males.

(The most recent investigator, however, believes these previous estimates

YOU AND HEREDITY 535

are exaggerated, but that, nevertheless, the excess of males over females
conceived is still greater than the ratio at birth.)

On what are these estimates based ? On the fact that the mortality among
male embryos averages about 50 percent higher than among female
embryos — completely contradicting the old belief that boys are better able
to survive the ordeal of birth.

About one-quarter of the \nown pregnancies result in still-births. Great
numbers of these aborted babies have been examined, and some surprising
data obtained. In embryos aborted when they are about three months old,
specialists can already distinguish sex, and in these early mortalities they
have found that the males outnumber the females almost four to one.
These, however, arc but a small percentage of the total still-births. In those
in the fourth month, aborted males are double those of females, in the fifth
month, 145 males to 100 females, in the next few months the proportion
drops further, but just before birth there is a rise to almost 140 males
aborted to every 100 females.

All this leads to another conclusion: That before birth, certainly, males
as a class are not only not stronger than females, but, quite on the cor^
trary, are weaker. If we look beyond birth, we find, moreover, that at
almost every stage of life, males drop out at a higher rate than females.
It may very well be, then, that a canny Nature enters more males than
females at the start of life's race in order to counterbalance the difference
in mortality.

Assuming that the male embryo is the likeliest to be carried off under
adverse conditions, we might gather that where the condition of a mother
is more unfavorable, the possibility of a son being born will be lessened.

Some evidence has been advanced to support this. Among mothers who
have had a considerable number of previous pregnancies the later children
show a drop in percentage of sons. Among colored mothers, in general,
perhaps because they may receive inferior care during pregnancy, there is
a markedly smaller percentage of sons born than among white women. It
has also been reported, from other countries, that births among unmarried
mothers show a lower than average ratio of sons, but recent figures for the
United States do not seem to bear this out.

A popular question is whether a tendency to bear sons may not run in
certain families or individuals. Quite possibly, yes, although researches are
not yet sufficiently adequate to permit a definite answer. One might guess
that exceptionally active or virile sperms on the part of males, or excep-
tionally favorable conditions for motherhood on the part of women, would
lead to an above-average ratio of male births. But a "run" of either sons

536 THE HUMAN MACHINE

or daughters in any given family may be as much a matter of chance as a
run of "sevens" in a dice game.

Knowing that an X-bearing sperm produces a girl, a Y -bearing sperm a
boy, might not a way be found of separating the two tynds and then, by
artificial insemination, producing boys and girls at will?

Yes — it seems only a matter of time before this will be possible. Already,
in a number of laboratories, geneticists are working toward this goal. The
distinct differences between the X sperm and Y sperm have provided a
basis for their experiments. Definite affirmative results are already reported
at this writing, and it is considered likely that in a not too distant future
many persons — or those, at least, to whom the laboratory facilities will be
available-— will be able to have a boy or girl baby, as they wish.

For the time being the matter of "boy or girl?" remains one of chance,
with this qualification, as we have seen : The better prepared a woman is
for motherhood, the slightly greater will be the odds that as the anxious
father paces the hospital corridor, the nurse will report,

"It's a boy!"

SUPER CHAIN-GANGS

Sex is but one of the myriad characteristics potentially determined by
your genes at the instant of conception.

But how, and by what processes, do the genes do their work during that
long dark interval between conception and birth?

Recall that a single gene is millions of times smaller than the smallest
speck you could see with your naked eye. How can such minute bits of
substance do such astounding things as molding the shape of your nose,
determining the color of your eyes or hair, actually making you sane or
insane?

What, to begin with, is a gene ?

At the present stage of our knowledge (and it is only yesterday, as
science computes it, that we even knew about genes) no one can answer
definitely, because it has so far not been possible to isolate a gene and to
analyze it. But geneticists know a great deal of what genes do and how
they do it. They are convinced (most of them) that a gene acts like an
enzyme, a substance which produces a certain chemical change in a
compound without in itself being affected.

Every housewife knows that a bit of yeast will make dough rise and
that a pellet of rennet will turn milk into "junket." Home brewers of the
prohibition era remember the potent effects of a few raisins in their jug
of mash. Manufacturers are familiar with hundreds of substances (small

YOU AND HEREDITY 537

pieces of platinum, for instance) used in various processes to bring about
desired chemical changes.

And finally, if one is still puzzled by the smallness of the gene and the
bigness of its effect, one has only to think of how a droplet of deadly
poison, such as cobra venom, can speedily bring about chemical changes
which will convert a hulking, roaring giant of a man into a lifeless mass
of flesh and bone.

In creating an individual, the genes work first upon the raw material in
the egg, then upon the materials which are sent in by the mother, con-
verting these into various products. These, in turn, react again with the
genes, leading to the formation of new products. So the process goes on,
meanwhile specific materials being sorted out to go into and construct the
various cells of the body.

Where the genes are unique is that they are alive and able to reproduce
themselves. It is not impossible that genes may be made up of smaller par-
ticles, but so far as science can trace back today the gene is the ultimate unit
of life.

We cannot therefore regard genes as mere chemical substances. When
we consider what they do, we may well think of them as workers endowed
with personalities. No factory, no industrial organization, has so varied an
aggregation of workers and specialists as the genes in a single individual,
and no army of workers can do more amazing things. Architects, en-
gineers, plumbers, decorators, chemists, artists, sculptors, doctors, dieticians,
masons, carpenters, common laborers — all these and many others will be
found among the genes. In their linked-together form (the chromosomes)
we can think of them as "chain-gangs" twenty-four of these gangs of
workers sent along by each parent to construct the individual.

Turn back to the moment of conception. The chain-gangs contributed
by your mother are packed together closely in a shell (the nucleus) sus-
pended in the sea of nutrient material which constitutes the egg. Suddenly,
into that sea, is plunged a similar shell (the sperm) filled with the chain-
gangs sent by your father. Its entrance causes both shells to break, and out
come the chain-gangs with their workers, stirred to activity.

The first impulse of the workers, after their long confinement, is to eat
(which seems natural enough). They gorge themselves on the sea of
materials around them, and as we have already noted before, they double
in size, split in half, and form two of themselves. The one-cell egg divides
into two cells, the two into four, the four into eight, etc. — a replica of each
original chain-gang going into each cell.

Up to this point the genes have all been doing ordinary construction
work. But now, while the process of multiplying themselves and the cells

538 THE HUMAN MACHINE

continues, the specialists get into action and begin constructing different
tynds of cells at different locations.

The details of how this is done — such details as are known or surmised
— fill tens of thousands of pages in scientific treatises. Briefly stated, we
can assume that on set cues the different genes step out for their special
tasks, snatching at this bit of material or element, combining it with
other stuffs, fashioning a product, setting it in place, etc., all the time
working in cooperation with the other genes.

Throughout one's lifetime the genes are in a constant ferment of activity,
carrying on and directing one's life processes at every stage. Everything
seems to be done according to plan, as if the most detailed blueprints
were being followed. The step-by-step process has been explained as a
sequence of reactions, the workers being motivated to each step by the
effects of the preceding one. By observing the process in lower experi-
mental animals we can see how first the broad general construction of the
body is worked out; then how certain cells are marked off for the organs,
certain ones for the respiratory and digestive systems, certain ones for the
muscles, others for the skin, features, etc.

The generalized cells now begin to develop into special ones. In those
marked off for the circulatory system the rudiments of hearts, veins and
arteries begin to be formed (here is where the "plumber" genes step in to
construct the great chain of pumps and pipe-lines) ; from the generalized
bone cells the skeleton begins to be shaped; from the skin cells, the rudi-
ments of features, etc. With each stage the specialization is carried further
along in the developing embryo. The amazing way in which the develop-
ment of every human being parallels that of every other proves how
infinitely exact and predetermined are the genes in their workings.

Another remarkable feature of the process is this: That despite the
growing differences in the various specialized cells, into every cell, as it is
being created and constructed, go exact replicas of all the chromosomes
with their genes. Thus, the same gene which produced eye color in your
eye cells will also be found in your big toe cells, and the same gene which
directed the fashioning of your big toe will also be found in your eye cells
— or in your ear and liver cells, for that matter! Probably, then, in addition
to every special task that each gene performs, it also takes part in general
activities which make its presence required everywhere.

But we recall now that the individual starts life with two chromosomes
of every kind, which means also two genes of every kind. If, in terms of
chain-gangs, we designate the chromosomes by letter, there would be two
Chain A's, two Chain B's, two Chain Cs, and so on up to the last pair-
where in the case of a girl, as noted in the preceding chapters, there would

YOU AND HEREDITY 539

be two Chain X's, but in the case of a boy, only one X Chain, the other
being a Y Chain. With this latter exception, the corresponding chain-
gangs (AA, BB, CC, etc.) would be exactly alike in the number of
workers each contained, and in the type of worker at each point in the
chain.

If the No. i gene in Chain A contributed to you by your father was an
architect, so would be the No. i gene in the Chain A from your mother.
The No. 2's in line might be carpenters, the No. 3'$ decorators, etc. All the
way from Chain A to Chain X, the genes at each point in all human beings
are exactly the same in the type of work to which they are assigned. In
other words, every individual starts life with two workers for each job, one
sent by the mother, one by the father.

But the corresponding genes in any two human beings are far from the
same. To be sure, they are sufficiently alike in their effects so that the dif-
ference between even our pigmy Hottentot friend and our tall blond
"Nordic" are insignificant compared to the difference between either one
and an ape. Nevertheless, within the range of human beings, the corre-
sponding genes are exceedingly variable in their workings, leading to
many peculiar effects and the marked differences that might exist between
individuals, even those in the same family.

Biography of the Unborn

MARGARET SHEA GILBERT

A Condensation from the

FIRST MONTH
OUT OF THE UNKNOWN

OUT OF THE UNKNOWN INTO THE IMAGE OF MAN—
this is the miraculous change which occurs during the first month
of human life. We grow from an egg so small as to be barely visible,
to a young human embryo almost one fourth of an inch long, increasing
50 times in size and 8000 times in weight. We change from a small round
egg cell into a creature with a head, a body and, it must be admitted, a
tail; with a heart that beats and blood that circulates; with the beginnings
of arms and legs, eyes and ears, stomach and brain. In fact, within the
first 30 days of our life almost every organ that serves us during our
allotted time (as well as some that disappear before birth) has started
to form.

Shortly after fertilization the great activity which was stirred up in the
egg by the entrance of the sperm leads to the division or "cleavage" of the
egg into two cells, which in turn divide into four and will go on so
dividing until the millions of cells of the human body have been formed.

In addition to this astounding growth and development we must also
make our first struggle for food. For this purpose a special "feeding"
layer" — the trophoblast — forms on the outer edge of the little ball of cells,
and "eats its way" into the tissues of the uterus. As these tissues are
digested by the trophoblast, the uterus forms a protective wall — the placenta
— which cooperates with the trophoblast in feeding the growing embryo.
The maternal blood carries food, oxygen (the essential component of the
air we breathe) and water to the placenta, where they are absorbed by
the trophoblast and passed on to the embryo through the blood vessels
in the umbilical cord. In return, the waste products of the embryo are

540

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN 541

brought to the placenta and transferred to the mother's blood, which carries
them to her kidneys and lungs to be thrown out. In no case does the
mother's blood actually circulate through the embryo — a prevalent but
quite unfounded belief.

Meanwhile the new individual has been moving slowly along the path
of changes which it is hoped will make a man of him. While the
trophoblast has been creating a nest for the egg in the uterine wall, the
inner cell-mass has changed from a solid ball of cells into a small hollow
organ resembling a figure 8 — that is, it contains two cavities separated in
the middle by a double-layered plate called the embryonic disc which,
alone, develops into a human being. The lower half of our hypothetical
figure eight becomes a small empty vesicle, called the yolksac, which
eventually (in the second month) is severed from the embyro. The upper
half forms a water-sac (called the amnion) completely surrounding the
embyro except at the thick umbilical cord. The embryo then floats in a
water-jacket which acts as a shock-absorber, deadening any jolts or severe
blows which may strike the mother's body.

Having now made sure of its safety, the truly embryonic part of the
egg — the double-layered plate — can enter wholeheartedly into the business
of becoming a human being. Oddly enough, it is his heart and his brain,
in their simplest forms, which first develop.

Almost at once (by the age of 17 days at most) the first special cells
whose exact future we can predict appear. They are young blood cells,
occurring in groups called blood islands which soon fuse to form a
single tube, the heart-tube, in the region that is to be the head end of the
embryonic disc. This simple tube must undergo many changes before it
becomes the typical human heart, but rather than wait for that distant day
before starting work, it begins pulsating at once. First a slight twitch runs
through the tube, then another, and soon the heart is rhythmically con-
tracting and expanding, forcing the blood to circulate through the blood
vessels in the embryonic disc. It must continue to beat until the end of
life.

About the same time the nervous system also arises. In the embryonic
disc a thickened oval plate forms, called the neural plate, the edges of
which rise as ridges from the flat surface and roll together into a round
tube exactly in the middle of what will be the embryo's back. The front
end of this tube will later develop into the brain; the back part will become
the spinal cord. Thus, in this fourth week of life, this simple tube repre-
sents the beginning of the nervous system — the dawn of the brain that is
to be man's most precious possession.

The embryo now turns his attention to the food canal. The hungry

542 THE HUMAN MACHINE

man calls this structure his stomach, but the embryologist briefly and
indelicately speaks of the gut. The flat embryonic disc becomes humped
up in the middle into a long ridgelike pocket which has a blind recess at
either end. Very shortly an opening breaks through from the foregut upon
the under surface of the future head to form the primitive mouth, though
a similar outlet at the hind end remains closed for some time.

Within 25 days after the simple egg was fertilized by the sperm, the
embryo is a small creature about one tenth of an inch long with head
and tail ends, a back and a belly. He has no arms or legs, and he lacks a
face or neck, so his heart lies close against his brain. Within this unhuman
exterior, however, he has started to form also his lungs, which first appear
as a shallow groove in the floor of the foregut; his liver is arising as a
thickening in the wall of the foregut just behind the heart; and he has
entered on a long and devious path which will ultimately lead to the
formation of his kidneys.

The development of the human kidneys presents a striking example
of a phenomenon which might be called an "evolutionary hangover."
Instead of forming at once the type of organ which he as a human will
use, the embryo forms a type which a much simpler animal (say the fish)
possesses. Then he scraps this "fish organ" and forms another which a
higher animal such as the frog uses. Again the embryo scraps the organ
and then, perhaps out of the fragments of these preceding structures, forms
his own human organ. It is as if, every time a modern locomotive was
built, the builder first made the oldest, simplest locomotive ever made,
took this engine apart, and out of the old and some new parts built a
later locomotive; and after several such trials finally built a modern
locomotive, perhaps using some metal which had gone into the first.
Scientists interpret this strange process common to the development of all
higher animals as a hasty, sketchy repetition of the long process of
evolution.

By the end of the month the embryo is about one fourth of an inch
long, curled almost in a circle, with a short pointed tail below his belly,
and small nubbins on the sides of his body — incipient arms and legs. On
the sides of his short neck appear four clefts, comparable to the gill-slits of
a fish — another "evolutionary hangover." Almost all the organs of the
human body have begun to form. In the head the eyes have arisen as two
small pouches thrust out from the young brain tube. The skin over the
front of the head shows two sunken patches of thickened tissue which are
the beginning of a nose. At a short distance behind each eye an ear has
started to develop— not the external ear, but the sensitive tissue which will
later enable the individual to hear. In 30 days the new human being has

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN 543

traveled the path from the mysteriously simple egg and sperm to the
threshold of humanity.

SECOND MONTH
THE FACE OF MAN

From tadpole to man: so one might characterize the changes that occur
during the second month of life. True, the embryo is not a tadpole, but
it looks not unlike one. The tailed bulbous creature with its enormous
drooping head, fish-like gill-slits, and formless stubs for arms and legs,
bears little resemblance to a human form. By the end of the second month,
however, the embryo has a recognizable human character, although it is
during this period that the human tail reaches its greatest development.
In this month the embryo increases sixfold in length (to almost an inch
and a half) and approximately 500 times in weight. Bones and muscles,
developing between the skin and the internal organs, round out the con-
tours of the body.

But the developing face and neck are the main features that give a
human appearance, however grotesque. The mouth, now bounded by
upper and lower jaws, is gradually reduced in size as the fused material
forms cheeks. The nasal-sacs gradually move closer together until they
form a broad nose. The eyes, which at first lie on the sides of the head, are
shifted around to the front. During the last week of the month eyelids
develop which shortly afterwards close down.

The forehead is prominent and bulging, giving the embryo a very brainy
appearance. In fact, the embryo is truly brainy in the sense that the brain
forms by far the largest part of the head. It will take the face many years
to overcome this early dominance of the brain and to reach the relative
size the face has in the adult.

The limbs similarly pass through a surprising series of changes. The
limb "buds" elongate, and the free end of the limb becomes flattened
into a paddlelike ridge which forms the finger-plate or toe-plate. Soon
five parallel ridges separated by shallow grooves appear within each
plate; the grooves are gradually cut through, thus setting off five distinct
fingers and toes. At the same time, transverse constrictions form within
each limb to mark off elbow and wrist, knee and ankle.

The human tail reaches its greatest development during the fifth week,
and the muscles which move the tail in lower animals are present. But
from this time it regresses, and only in abnormal cases is it present in the
newborn infant. Along with the muscles develop the bones. In most
instances of bone development a pattern of the bone is first formed in
cartilage, a softer translucent material, and later a hard bony substance is

544 THE HUMAN MACHINE

laid down in and around the cartilage model. As a sculptor first fashions
his work in clay and then, when he knows that his design is adequate,
casts the statue in bronze, so the developing embryo seems to plan out its
skeleton in cartilage and then cast it in bone. This process continues
through every month of life before birth, and throughout childhood and
adolescence. Not until maturity is the skeleton finally cast.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the second month of life is
the development of the sexual organs. At the beginning of the month
there is no way of telling the sex of the embryo except by identifying
the sex chromosomes. By the end of the month the sex is clearly evident
in the internal sex organs and is usually indicated externally. The most
surprising aspect of sexual development is that the first-formed organs
are identical in the two sexes. Even milk glands start to develop in both
sexes near the end of the second month. Nature seems to lay down in each
individual all the sexual organs of the race, then by emphasizing certain
of these organs and allowing the remainder to degenerate, transforms
the indifferent embryo into male or female.

Is each human being, then, fundamentally bisexual with the organs and
functions of the apparent sex determined at fertilization holding in
abeyance the undeveloped characters of the opposite sex? Laboratory
experiments with sex-reversal in lower animals suggest that there may be
various degrees of sexual development, even in mankind, and that between
the typical male and female there may occur various degrees of inter-
sexuality.

So the second month of life closes with the stamp of human likeness
clearly imprinted on the embryo. During the remaining seven months the
young human being is called a fetus, and the chief changes will be growth
and detailed development.

THIRD MONTH
EMERGENCE OF SEX

Now the future "lords of all they survey" assert their ascendency over
the timid female, for the male child during the third month plunges into
the business of sexual development, while the female dallies nearer the
neutral ground of sexual indifference. Or if sexual differences are over-
looked, the third month could be marked the "tooth month," for early in
this period buds for all 20 of the temporary teeth of childhood are laid
down, and the sockets for these teeth arise in the hardening jaw bones,

Although six months must pass before the first cry of the infant will
be heard, the vocal cords whose vibrations produce such cries now appear,
at present as ineffective as a broken violin string. Only during the first

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN 545

six months after birth do they take on the form of effective human vocal
cords. It must be remembered that during the period of life within the
uterus no air passes through the larynx into the lungs. The fetus lives in a
watery world where breathing would merely flood the lungs with
amniotic fluid, and the vocal cords remain thick, soft and lax.

The digestive system of the three-months-old fetus begins to show
signs of activity. The cells lining the stomach have started to secrete
mucus — the fluid which acts as a lubricant in the passage of food through
the digestive organs. The liver starts pouring bile into the intestine. The
kidneys likewise start functioning, secreting urine which gradually seeps
out of the fetal bladder into the amniotic fluid, although most of the waste
products of the fetus's body will still be passed through the placenta into
the mother's blood.

Overlying the internal organs are the bones and muscles which, with
their steady development, determine the form, contours, and strength
of the fetal body. In the face, the developing jaw bones, the cheek bones,
and even the nasal bones that form the bridge of the nose, begin to give
human contours and modeling to the small, wizened fetal face. Centers
of bone formation have appeared in the cartilages of the hands and feet,
but the wrists and ankles are still supported only by cartilage.

No longer is there any question about whether or not the fetus is a
living, individual member of mankind. Not only have several of the
internal organs taken on their permanent functions, but the well-developed
muscles now produce spontaneous movements of the arms, legs and
shoulders, and even of the fingers.

FOURTH MONTH
THE QUICKENING

Death throws its shadow over man before he is born, for the stream of
life flows most swiftly through the embryo and young fetus, and then
inexorably slows down, even within the uterus. The period of greatest
growth occurs during the third and fourth fetal months, when .the fetus
grows approximately six to eight inches in length, reaching almost one
half its height at birth. Thereafter the rate of growth decreases steadily.

However, the young fetus is not a miniature man, but a gnomelike
creature whose head is too large, trunk too broad, and legs too short.
At two months the head forms almost one half of the body; from the
third to fifth months it is one third, at birth one fourth, and in the adult
about one tenth the body height.

Nevertheless, the four-month fetus is not an unhandsome creature.
With his head held more or less erect, and his back reasonably straight, he

546 THE HUMAN MACHINE

bears a real resemblance to a normal infant. The face is wide but well
modeled, with widely spaced eyes. The hands and feet are well formed.
The fingers and toes are rather broad, and are usually flexed. At the tip
of each finger and toe patterned whorls of skin ridges appear — the basis
of future fingerprints and toeprints. As might be expected, the pattern
of these skin ridges is characteristically different for each fetus; at four
months each human being is marked for life with an individual, unchange-
able stamp of identity.

The skin of the body is in general dark red and quite wrinkled at this
time; the redness indicates that the skin is so thin that the blood cours-
ing through the underlying vessels determines its color. Very little fat
is stored in the fetus's body before the sixth month, and the skin remains
loose and wrinkled until underlain by fat.

Now the still, silent march of the fetus along the road from conception
to birth becomes enlivened and quickened. The fetus stirs, stretches, and
vigorously thrusts out arms and legs. The first movements to be per-
ceived by the mother may seem to her like the fluttering of wings, but
before long his blows against the uterine wall inform her in unmistakable
terms that life is beating at the door of the womb. For this is the time of
the "quickening in the womb" of folklore.

FIFTH MONTH
HAIR, NAILS AND SKIN

Man is an enigma; indivisible and yet complex; he is composed of
hundreds of separate parts that are constantly dying and being renewed,
yet he retains a mysterious "individuality." The human being may be
compared to a cooperative society whose members band together for
mutual support and protection, presenting a common front to the external
world, and sharing equally in the privileges and responsibilities of their
internal world. Division of labor, specialization, and the exchange of
produce are just as important in the society of cells and organs as in the
society of men. The digestive organs convert the materials taken in as food
into the components of living cells. The circulating fluids of the body form
an extensive transportation system. Nerves are the cables of the communi-
cations system while the brain is the central exchange. The potent endo-
crine glands determine the speed and constancy of many activities. Over-
lying all of the body's specialized systems is the skin — the protector, con-
servator, and inquirer of the society of organs.

Now that the internal organs are well laid down, the skin and the
structures derived from it hasten to attain their final form. The surface

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN 547

of the skin becomes covered with tough, dried and dead cells which
form a protective barrier between the environment and the soft tissues of
the body. Even as in life after birth, the outer dead cells are being con-
stantly sloughed off and replaced from below by the continually growing
skin. Sweat glands are formed, and sebaceous glands, which secret? oil
at the base of each hair. During the fifth month these glands pour out a
fatty secretion which, becoming mixed with the dead cells sloughed off
from the skin, forms a cheesy paste covering the entire body. This material,
called the vernix caseosa, is thought to serve the fetus as a protective
cloak from the surrounding amniotic fluid, which by this time contains
waste products which might erode the still tender skin.

Derivatives of the skin likewise undergo marked development. Fine
hair is generally present all over the scalp at this time. Nails appear on the
fingers and toes. In the developing tooth germs of the "milk teeth," the
pearly enamel cap and the underlying bonelike dentine are formed.

But the most striking feature of the month's development is the straight-
ening of the body axis. Early in the second month the embryo forms
almost a closed circle, with its tail not far from its head. At three months
the head has been raised considerably and the back forms a shallow
curve. At five months the head is erectly balanced on the newly formed
neck, and the back is still less curved. At birth the head is perfectly erect
and the back is almost unbelievably straight. In fact, it is more nearly
straight than it will ever be again, for as soon as the child learns to sit and
walk, secondary curvatures appear in the spinal column as aids in body
balance.

The five-month fetus is a lean creature, with wrinkled skin, about
a foot long and weighing about one pound. If born (or, strictly speaking,
aborted) it may live for a few minutes, take a few breaths, and perhaps
cry. But it soon gives up the struggle and dies. Although able to move its
arms and legs actively, it seems to be unable to maintain the complex
movements necessary for continued breathing.

SIXTH MONTH
EYES THAT OPEN ON DARKNESS

Now the expectant parents of the six-months-old human fetus may
become overwhelmingly curious about the sex of their off-spring, especially
when they realize that the sex is readily perceived in the fetus. Yet to the
external world no sign is given.

During the sixth month the eyelids, fused shut since the third month,
reopen. Completely formed eyes arc disclosed which, during the seventh

548 THE HUMAN MACHINE

month, become responsive to light. Eyelashes and eyebrows usually
develop in the sixth or seventh month.

Within the mouth, taste buds are present all over the surface of the
tongue, and on the roof and walls of the mouth and throat, being relatively
more numerous than in the infant or adult. It seems odd that the fetus,
with no occasion for tasting, should be more plentifully equipped, and
some biologists believe that this phenomenon is but another evidence
of the recurrence of evolutionary stages in development, since in many
lower animals taste organs are more widely and generously distributed
than they are in man.

The six-month fetus, if born, will breathe, cry, squirm, and perhaps
live for several hours, but the chances of such a premature child surviving
are extremely slight unless it is protected in an incubator. The vitality,
the strength to live, is a very weak flame, easily snuffed out by the first
adverse contact with the external world.

SEVENTH MONTH
THE DORMANT BRAIN

Now the waiting fetus crosses the unknown ground lying between
dependence and independence. For although he normally spends two
more months within the sure haven of the uterus, he is nonetheless capable
of independent life. If circumstances require it and the conditions of birth
are favorable, the seven-month fetus is frequently able to survive pre-
mature birth.

One of the prime causes of the failure of younger fetuses to survive
birth is believed to be the inadequate development of the nervous system,
especially of those parts concerned in maintaining constant rhythmic
breathing movements, in carrying out the sequence of muscular contrac-
tions involved in swallowing, and in the intricate mechanism for main-
taining body temperature.

The human nervous system consists of a complex network of nerves
connecting all the organs of the body with the brain and spinal cord,
the centralized "clearinghouse" for all the nervous impulses brought irj
from the sense organs and sent out to the muscles. By the third month of
life special regions and structures have developed within the brain: the
cerebellum, an expanded part of the brain that receives fibers coining
mostly from the ear; and two large saclike outpocketings, the cerebral
hemispheres, which are the most distinctive feature of man's brain. They
are destined to become the most complex and elaborately developed struc-
tures known in the nervous system of any animal. They are alleged by
some to be the prime factor in man's dominance over other animals.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN 549

At seven months these hemispheres cover almost all the brain, and some
vague, undefined change in the minute nerve cells and fibers accomplishes
their maturation. Henceforth the nervous system of the fetus is capable
of successful functioning.

The seven-month fetus is a red-skinned, wrinkled, old-looking child
about 16 inches long and weighing approximately three pounds. If born
he will cry, breathe, and swallow. He is, however, very susceptible to infec-
tion and needs extra protection from the shocks which this new life in the
external world administers to his delicate body. He is sensitive to a light
touch on the palm. He probably perceives the difference between light and
dark. Best of all — he has a chance to survive.

EIGHTH AND NINTH MONTHS
BEAUTY THAT IS SKIN-DEEP

Now the young human being, ready for birth, with all his essential
organs well formed and able to function, spends two more months putting
the finishing touches on his anatomy, and improving his rather question-
able beauty. Fat is formed rapidly all over his body, smoothing out the
wrinkled, flabby skin and rounding out his contours. The dull red color
of the skin fades gradually to a flesh-pink shade. The fetus loses the
wizened, old-man look and attains the more acceptable lineaments of a
human infant.

Pigmentation of the skin is usually very slight, so that even the offspring
of colored races are relatively light-skinned at birth. Even the iris of the
eye is affected; at birth the eyes of most infants are a blue-gray shade
(which means that very little pigment is present) and it is usually impos-
sible to foretell their future color.

The fetus is by no means a quiet, passive creature, saving all his activity
until after birth. He thrashes out with arms and legs, and may even
change his position within the somewhat crowded quarters of the uterus.
He seems to show alternate periods of activity and quiescence, as if per-
haps he slept a bit and then took a little exercise.

EXODUS

Just what specific event initiates the birth sequence remains unknown.
For some weeks or even months previous to birth, slow, rhythmic mus-
cular contractions, similar to those which cause labor pains, occur in a
mild fashion in the uterus. Why the uterus, after withstanding this long
period of futile contractions, is suddenly thrown into the powerful,
effective muscular movements which within a few hours expel the long-
tolerated fetus remains the final mystery of our prenatal life. It is quite

550 THE HUMAN MACHINE

probable that the birth changes occur as a complex reaction of the mother's
entire body, especially those potent endocrine glands which may pour
into the blood stream chemicals that stimulate immediate and powerful
contractions of the uterine muscle.

There is nothing sacrosanct about the proverbial "nine months and ten
days" as the duration of pregnancy; but 10 per cent of the fetuses are born
on the 28oth day after the onset of the last true menstrual period and
approximately 75 per cent are born within two weeks of that day.

As soon as the infant is born, he usually gasps, fills his lungs with air
and utters his first bleating cry, either under the influence of the shock
which this outer world gives to his unaccustomed body or from some
stimulus administered by the attending doctor. The infant is still, how-
ever, connected through the umbilical cord with the placenta lodged
within the uterine wall. Their usefulness ended, the placenta and um-
bilical cord are cut off from the infant. The stump soon degenerates, but
its scar, the defect in the abdominal wall caused by the attachment of the
cord to the fetus, remains throughout life as the navel — a permanent
reminder of our once parasitic mode of living.

The newborn infant is by no means a finished and perfect human
being. Several immediate adjustments are required by the change from
intra-uterine to independent life. The lungs at birth are relatively small,
compact masses of seemingly dense tissue. The first few breaths expand
them until they fill all the available space in the chest cavity, and as the
numerous small air sacs are filled with air, the lungs become light and
spongy in texture. But it is not yet a complete human lung, for new air
sacs are formed throughout early childhood, and even those formed before
birth do not function perfectly until several days of regular breathing have
passed.

The heart, which is approximately the size of the infant's closed fist,
gradually beats more slowly, approaching the normal rate of the human
heart. Shortly after birth the material which has been accumulating in
the intestine during the last six months of fetal life is passed off. One
peculiarity of the newborn infant is that the intestine and its contents
are completely sterile; the elaborate and extensive bacterial population
present in the intestine of all human beings appears only after birth.

Neither tear glands nor salivary glands are completely developed at
birth; the newborn infant cries without tears, and his saliva does not
acquire its full starch-digesting capacity until near weaning time. The
eyes, although sensitive to light, have not yet acquired the power of
focusing on one point so that the newborn infant may be temporarily
cross-eyed.

HOW THE HUMAN BODY IS STUDIED 551

Thus the first nine months of life are completed. The manifold changes
occurring during this period form the first personal history of each mem-
ber of the race. It is the one phase of life which we all have in common;
it is essentially the same ror all men.

'939

How the Human Body Is Studied

SIR ARTHUR KEITH

From Man: A History of the Human Body

¥N ALL THE MEDICAL SCHOOLS OF LONDON A NOTICE

-**• is posted over the door leading to the dissecting room forbidding
strangers to enter. I propose, however, to push the door open and ask the
reader to accompany me within, for, if we are to understand the human
body, it is essential that we should see the students at work. If we enter
in the right spirit — with a desire to learn something of the structure of
man's wonderful body with our own eyes — there is nothing in the room
which need repel or offend us. The room is lofty, well-lighted and clean;
the students in their white coats are grouped round tables on which lie
the embalmed bodies of men and women who have run the race of life —
often, alas ! with but ill fortune. The students are dissecting systematically,
each with his text-book placed beside him for consultation and guidance,
and with the instruments of dissection in his hands. The human body
is to be the subject of their life's work; if they are to recognize and treat
its illnesses and injuries they must know each part as familiarly as the
pianist knows the notes of the keyboard. We propose to watch them at
work. Each student is at his allotted part, and if we observe them in
turn we shall, in an hour or less, obtain an idea of the main tissues and
structures which enter into the composition of the human body.

By good fortune a dissection is in progress in front of the wrist, which
displays, amongst other structures, the radial artery at which the physi-

552 THE HUMAN MACHINE

cian feels the pulse and counts the rate of the heart's beat. The skin here
is loose and thin, and as the student turns it aside in flaps he uses his
knife to free it from the white subcutaneous tissue which binds it down
to the deeper parts. He looks at his own wrist and sees why the skin here
is loose; as he bends his wrist the skin is thrown into folds; when he
extends it, the skin in front of the wrist is stretched; unless it were loosely
bound down it would be impossible to move the wrist joint freely. On
the palm the skin is different; it is thick and bound firmly by dense
subcutaneous tissue to the underlying parts; there would be no firmness
of grasp unless the skin of the palm were thick and closely bound down.
As the student turns back the skin from the front of the wrist he searches
in the loose tissue under it for the nerves which supply the skin with the
power of feeling and for small veins which carry the used or venous
blood back to the heart. He squeezes the blood backwards in these vessels;
they swell out here and there into little knobs owing to the presence of
pockets or valves which permit the blood to flow only in one direction,
namely, towards the heart. It was the study of the arrangement of these
valves, nearly three centuries ago now, which led Harvey to the discovery
of the circulation. Beneath the skin and subcutaneous tissue there is
another covering which has to be cut through before the sinews or
tendons in front of the wrist are exposed to view. This third wrapping —
the deep fascia the student will call it — is membranous and strong and
keeps the tendons in place; workmen often find it necessary to add
additional support by means of a wrist-strap. The tendons are glistening
almost white; eight of them go to the fingers (two to each); one goes
to the thumb and two act on the bones of the wrist or carpus. Just above
the wrist joint the tendons have attached to them the muscles which
flex the fingers and the wrist. They look so simple in the dead body; yet
one has but to watch the fingers and wrists of the pianist or of the typist
to see how quick and complicated they can be in life. As the student
traces the tendons into the palm of the hand he sees them become in-
folded within a loose sac with its interior lined by a smooth lubricated
surface. This synovial sac is an example of the perfect manner in which
the human machine is made; a self-oiling mechanism is provided at each
point of friction. From overwork or injury fluid may collect in this sac
and weaken the power of the workman's wrist.

Lying side by side with the sinews at the wrist there is another cord,
somewhat like them in appearance, but very different in nature. It is the
median nerve. Our friend the dissector has already seen a patient in the
wards of the hospital with a jagged wound at the wrist which has
injured the nerve. In that case be noticed that the thumb, fore, middle

HOW THE HUMAN BODY IS STUDIED 553

and part of the ring fingers had lost their usual sense of feeling, and that
some of the small muscles of the thumb had no longer the power of
movement. For our benefit he traces the nerve upwards in the forearm,
arm, through the armpit until it reaches the root of the neck, where it
is seen to be formed by five pairs of nerve roots which issue from the
spinal cord. In the median nerve we see one of the paths which unite the
brain and hand; messages pass by it from the hand which the brain
interprets as heat or cold, rough or smooth, sharp or blunt; other
messages pass outwards from the brain to start or stop the muscles of
the forearm or fingers. The student pays particular attention to the radial
artery; on the wrist, just above the root of the thumb, he finds the vessel
resting on the lower end of the radius. He places his finger over the
artery and observes how easily he can press it against the bone. In life
we feel the artery suddenly expand and then subside with each beat of
the heart; with a finger on the pulse the physician knows how the heart
is working.

We propose to observe the dissector as he traces the radial artery to
the heart. Below the bend of the elbow it is seen to issue from the main
vessel of the upper arm — the brachial; the brachial in turn is found to be
a continuation of the great artery of the armpit — the axillary. From the
armpit the great arterial channel is followed across the root of the neck
through the upper opening of the chest or thorax until it joins the aorta —
the great vessel which springs from the left ventricle of the heart.

It must not be thought that the artery at the wrist is merely an elastic-
walled pipe which expands passively as the ventricle discharges its load
of blood; it is much more than that. When the student places a very thin
section of the artery under the microscope for our particular benefit, we
see that it has an exceedingly smooth lining, in order that the blood may
flow with a minimum of friction; outside the lining there is seen an inner
coat with contains many elastic fibres; then another coat made up of
small contractile or muscular fibres. These muscular fibres regulate the
size of the artery; they give or yield with each beat of the heart, and then
contract, thus assisting the heart to force the blood onwards to nourish
the tissues of the hand. The artery we have just seen under the micro-
scope had been continuously expanding and contracting for over seventy
years at the rate of seventy or eighty times a minute. No elastic tube yet
invented by man could have done that. We note, however, that it has
suffered the changes which overtake our arteries when they have been
at work for forty years or even less; the elastic tissue and the muscle
fibres are clogged with lime-salts; the elasticity of youth is gone. Hence
as we grow older we cannot make the violent "spurts" of our youth.

554 THE HUMAN MACHINE

Before leaving the dissection we have been surveying it will be well
to see one of those marvelously contrived structures known as a joint.
The wrist joint is still hidden by the tendons; even when these are cut
through the interior of the joint is not yet visible; it is enclosed by stout
bands of tissue or ligaments which become tight when the joint is over-
bent. They prevent dislocation of the joint; indeed, so strong are those
of the wrist joint that when we stumble forwards, or fall on the out-
stretched hand, it is the bones and not the ligaments which are apt to
give way. When the ligaments are cut through, the articulating or
jointed surfaces of the bones are seen. They are covered by an exceedingly
smooth coating of white cartilage. Here, again, there is a self-lubricating
mechanism which reduces friction at the joint to a minimum. In those
individuals, however, who have the misfortune to suffer from rheumatism
the self-lubricating mechanism has failed, the cartilaginous covering has
become dry and worn away, and instead of a joint which works smoothly
and silently there is one which is rough and creaks like a gate swinging
on a rusty hinge.

We have surveyed the anatomy at the wrist in some detail and with a
very distinct purpose. At every part of the limbs — upper and lower — we
see the same arrangement of parts as at the wrist. There is first a covering
of skin, then a layer of subcutaneous tissue, which unites the skin loosely
to the third wrapping — the deep fascia. Within the sleeve of deep fascia
are packed the muscles which move the limbs, the nerves which control
the muscles and supply sensation to the parts; the great arteries which
carry the nourishing blood from the left ventricle of the heart, and the
great veins which return the used blood to the right ventricle — the pump
of the lungs. When the fleshy or perishable parts are removed by dissec-
tion or by the corruption which so soon overtakes the soft parts after
death, only the bones or skeleton remain to represent what was at one
time a marvelous living machine.

We now propose to transfer our attention for a short time to two
students who are uncovering the parts in front of the neck between the
chin and breastbone or sternum. The windpipe has already been exposed,
and is seen issuing from the voice-box or larynx below the chin to dis-
appear at the upper opening of the chest on its way to the lungs. On each
side of the windpipe the carotid arteries are found passing upwards to
supply the head and brain with blood; close by them are the jugular
veins carrying the venous blood in an opposite direction. Here we have
an opportunity given us of seeing a peculiar feature of man's structure.
Just above the larynx the carotid artery divides into two branches, an
external one which nourishes the face, and an internal one which sup-

HOW THE HUMAN BODY IS STUDIED 555

plies the brain with blood. Man has a large brain and a relatively small
face, hence in him the internal branch is the larger. In all other animals
the external is much the larger, because the face is massive while the
brain is small. It has been suggested that our brains are large because
of the calibre of our internal carotid arteries; that statement we do not
believe any more than the word of the waggoner who assures us that
it is the dray which pulls the horse. Our object, however, in examining the
anatomy of the neck is to see that curious structure or gland known as
the thyroid body. It is made up of two parts or lobes, one on each side of
the larynx and upper part of the windpipe; the lobes are united together
by a part which crosses in front of the windpipe. Most glands in the
body, such as the salivary and liver, have ducts or channels by which is
discharged the substances they secrete, but there is no duct connected
with the thyroid. The secretion which it forms is discharged directly
into the blood stream and hence it is called a ductless gland or a gland
of internal secretion. In recent years we have come to recognize that the
secretion of the thyroid body is of the greatest importance. In children
who suffer from disease of this gland we see that the growth of their
bones is delayed or ceases, their skin becomes pasty, puffy and ill-
nourished, and what is more serious their brains do not develop properly,
and they become cretins or idiots. In some parts of this country — espe-
cially in Derbyshire — the thyroid is apt to become enlarged, forming
a goitre and giving rise to the condition popularly known as "Derbyshire
neck." There are other ductless glands, such as the pituitary body which
lies enclosed within the skull and below the brain, and the suprarenal
bodies which are situated in the abdomen above the kidneys. Our sense
of well-being, our capacity for work and for pleasure, the nourishment
and growth of our bony frames depend to a very great extent on the
manner in which these small, insignificant-looking ductless glands per-
form their proper functions.

Our time with the students in the dissecting room has almost expired;
there remains only a moment to glance at a dissection which is exposing
the important organs which are enclosed within the thorax and abdomen.
Part of the front wall of these cavities has been removed. Within the
thorax we see the heart enclosed within its fibrous sac — the pericardium.
Two great arteries issue from its upper part — the pulmonary artery to
convey the impure blood from the right ventricle to the lungs, and the
aorta from the left ventricle to nourish the body with pure blood. Two
great veins enter the right side of the heart — the upper and lower venae
cavae; they bring back the impure blood gathered from the various parts
of the body. The pulmonary veins convey the pure blood from the lungs

556 THE HUMAN MACHINE

to the left side of the heart. Within the thoracic cavity are the two lungs,
one on each side of the heart. They are mottled and dark with soot, show-
ing that their owner had breathed the air of those who live in large cities.

At the moment we have chosen to view the students at work two of
them are examining that wonderful partition — the diaphragm — which
separates the chamber containing the heart and lungs from the lower or
abdominal cavity in which the organs concerned with digestion are placed.
Thanks to the discovery of Rontgen these students have a decided advan-
tage over their predecessors of fifteen years ago; they can see the dia-
phragm, which is mainly composed of muscle, actually at work in your
body or mine. As we take a breath the domes of the diaphragm are seen
to descend, enlarging the cavity of the thorax, and we see the lungs
become clearer as they expand and are filled with air. We can also see
the dark shadow of the liver descending below the right dome of the
diaphragm and the transparency that marks the stomach pushed down-
wards under the left dome. As we allow our breath to escape we see
the domes of the diaphragm again ascend, and if we place our hand on
our bodies as we breathe we shall observe that, as the diaphragm ascends,
the muscles which enclose the abdomen are at work, pressing the visera
and the diaphragm upwards and thus returning the parts to a proper
position for taking another breath. All the muscles which we now see
connected with the walls of the cavities of the thorax and abdomen are
concerned in respiration. At the moment of birth they begin to work and
keep on unceasingly all through the years of life until death brings to a
final stop one of the most wonderful mechanisms of the human body.
We have not the time now to look at the nerves and nerve centres which
control the muscles of respiration and keep them at work both when we
sleep and when we wake.

There are structures connected with digestion which we might exam-
ine, but we must postpone their consideration until another opportunity,
It may have occurred, however, to the onlooker that, since we can trans-
illuminate the human body, it is no longer necessary to dissect it. Dissec-
tion is still necessary, for we cannot interpret correctly what is seen when
the body is lighted up under X-rays unless we already possess an ex-
tremely accurate knowledge of the arrangement of parts as they are
displayed in the human body after death.

Our cursory visit to the dissecting room has not been in vain if the
reader has realized how complex the structure of the human body really
is, and how necessary it is that those who have to cure its disorders
should try to understand the intricacy of its mechanism. We have seen,
however — and this is of more importance for our present purpose — the

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 557

manner in which our knowledge of the human body is obtained. What
one generation of anatomists has learned is written in books and thus
handed on. For more than three centuries men have studied the structure
of the human body, and yet to-day there is still much, very much, which
we do not understand, but we live and work in the hope that our knowl-
edge will continue to increase.

Jp/2

Variations on a Theme by Darwin

JULIAN HUXLEY

DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY WE HAVE HEARD SO
much of the revolutionary discoveries of modern physics that
we are apt to forget how great has been the change in the outlook due
to biology. Yet in some respects this has been the more important. For
it is affecting the way we think and act in our everyday existence. With-
out the discoveries and ideas of Darwin and the other great pioneers in
the biological field, from Mendel to Freud, we should all be different
from what we are. The discoveries of physics and chemistry have given
us an enormous control over lifeless matter and have provided us with
a host of new machines and conveniences, and this certainly has reacted
on our general attitude. They have also provided us with a new outlook
on the universe at large: our ideas about time and space, matter and
creation, and our own position in the general scheme of things, are
very different from the ideas of our grandfathers.

Biology is beginning to provide us with control over living matter —
new drugs, new methods for fighting disease, new kinds of animals and
plants. It is helping us also to a new intellectual outlook, in which man
is seen not as a finished being, single lord of creation, but as one among
millions of the products of an evolution that is still in progress. But
it is doing something more. It is actually making us different in our
natures and our biological behaviour. I will take but three examples.

The application of the discoveries of medicine and physiology is making

558 THE HUMAN MACHINE

us healthier: and a healthy man behaves and thinks differently from one
who is not so healthy. Then the discoveries of modern psychology have
been altering our mental and emotional life, and our system of education:
taken in the mass, the young people now growing up feel differently,
and will therefore act differently, about such vital matters as sex and
marriage, about jealousy, about freedom of expression, about the relation
between parents and children. And as a third example, as a race we are
changing our reproductive habits: the idea and the practice of deliberate
birth-control has led to fewer children. People living in a country of small
families and a stationary or decreasing population will in many respects
be different from people in a country of large families and an increasing
population.

This change has not been due to any very radical new discoveries
made during the present century. It has been due chiefly to discoveries
which were first made in the previous century, and are at last beginning
to exort a wide effect. These older discoveries fall under two chief heads.
One is Evolution — the discovery that all living things, including our-
selves, are the product of a slow process of development which has been
brought about by natural forces, just as surely as has to-day's weather
or last month's high tides. The other is the sum of an enormous number
of separate discoveries which we may call physiological, and which boil
down to this: that all living things, again including ourselves, work ac-
cording to regular laws, in just the same way as do non-living things,
except that living things are much more complicated. The old idea
of "vital-force" has been driven back and back until there is hardly any
process of life where it can still find any foothold. Looked at objectively
and scientifically, a man is an exceedingly complex piece of chemical
machinery. This does not mean that he cannot quite legitimately be
looked at from other points of view — subjectively, for instance; what it
means is that so far as it goes, this scientific point of view is true, and
not the point of view which ascribed human activities to the working
of a vital force quite different from the forces at work in matter which
was not alive.

Imagine a group of scientists from another planet, creatures with quite
a different nature from ours, who had been dispassionately studying the
curious objects called human beings for a number of years. They would
not be concerned about what we men felt we were or what we would
like to be, but only about getting an objective view of what we actually
were and why we were what we were. It is that sort of picture which
I want to draw for you. Our Martian scientists would have to consider
us from three main viewpoints if they were to understand much about us.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 559

First they would have to understand our physical construction, and
what meaning it had in relation to the world around and the work we
have to do in it. Secondly, they would have to pay attention to our de-
velopment and our history. And thirdly, they would have to study the
construction and working of our minds. Any one of these three aspects
by itself would give a very incomplete picture of us.

An ordinary human being is a lump of matter weighing between 50
and 100 kilograms. This living matter is the same matter of which the
rest of the earth, the sun, and even the most distant stars and nebulae
are made. Some elements which make up a large proportion of living
matter, like hydrogen and especially carbon, are rare in the not-living
parts of the earth; and others which are abundant in the earth are, like
iron, present only in traces in living creatures, or altogether absent, like
aluminum or silicon. None the less, it is the same matter. The chief
difference between living and non-living matter is the complication of
living matter. Its elements are built up into molecules much bigger and
more elaborate than any other known, often containing more than a
thousand atoms each. And of course, living matter has the property of
self -reproduction; when supplied with the right materials and in the
right conditions, it can build up matter which is not living into its own
complicated patterns.

Life, in fact, from1 the "public" standpoint, which Professor Levy has
stressed as being the only possible standpoint for science, is simply the
name for the various distinctive properties of a particular group of very
complex chemical compounds. The most important of these properties
are, first, feeding, assimilation, growth, and reproduction, which are
all aspects of the one quality of self-reproduction; next, the capacity for
reacting to a number of kinds of changes in the world outside — to
stimuli, such as light, heat, pressure, and chemical change; then the
capacity for liberating energy in response to these stimuli, so as to react
back again upon the outer world — whether by moving about, by con-
structing things, by discharging chemical products, or by generating
light or heat; and finally the property of variation. Self-reproduction is
not always precisely accurate, and the new substance is a little differ-
ent from the parent substance which produced it.

The existence of self-reproduction on the one hand and variation on
the other automatically leads to what Darwin called "natural selection."
This is a sifting process, by which the different new variations are tested
out against the conditions of their existence, and in which some succeed
better than others in surviving and in leaving descendants. This blind
process slowly but inevitably causes living matter to change— in other

560 THE HUMAN MACHINE

words, it leads to evolution. There may be other agencies at work in
guiding the course of evolution; but it seems certain that natural selection
is the most important.

The results it produces are roughly as follows. It adapts any particular
stream of living matter more or less completely to the conditions in
which it lives. As there are innumerable different sets of conditions to
which life can be adapted, this has led to an increasing diversity of life,
a splitting of living matter into an increasing number of separate streams.
The final tiny streams we call species; there are perhaps a million of
them now in existence. This adaptation is progressive; any one stream of
life is forced to grow gradually better and better adapted to some par-
ticular condition of life. We can often see this in the fossil records of past
life. For instance, the early ancestors of lions and horses about 50 million
years ago were not very unlike, but with the passage of time one line
grew better adapted to grass-eating and running away from enemies.
And finally natural selection leads to general progress; there is a gradual
rising of the highest level attained by life. The most advanced animals
are those which have changed their way of life and adapted themselves
to new conditions, thus taking advantages of biological territory hitherto
unoccupied. The most obvious example of this was the invasion of the
land. Originally all living things were confined to life in water, and it
was not for hundreds of millions of years after the first origin of life
that plants and animals managed to colonize dry land.

But progress can also consist in taking better advantage of existing
conditions: for instance, the mammars biological inventions, of warm
blood and of nourishing the unborn young within the mother's body,
put them at an advantage over other inhabitants of the land; and the
increase in size of brain which is man's chief characteristic has enabled
him to control and exploit his environment in a new and more effective
way, from which his pre-human ancestors were debarred.

It follows from this that all animals and plants that are at all highly
developed have a long and chequered history behind them, and that
their present can often not be properly understood without an under-
standing of their past. For instance, the tiny hairs all over our own
bodies are a reminder of the fact that we are descended from furry
creatures, and have no significance except as a survival.

Let us now try to get some picture of man in the light of these ideas.
The continuous stream of life that we call the human race is broken up
into separate bits which we call individuals. This is true of all higher
animals, but is not necessary: it is a convenience. Living matter has
to deal with two sets of activities: one concerns its immediate relations

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 561

with the world outside it, the other concerns its future perpetuation.
What we call an individual is an arrangement permitting a stream of
living matter to deal more effectively with its environment. After a time
it is discarded and dies. But within itself it contains a reserve of poten-
tially immortal substance, which it can hand on to future generations, to
produce new individuals like itself. Thus from one aspect the individual
is only the casket of the continuing race; but from another the achieve-
ments of the race depend on the construction of its separate individuals.

The human individual is large as animal individuals go. Size is an
advantage if life is not to be at the mercy of small changes in the outer
world : for instance, a man the size of a beetle could not manage to keep
his temperature constant. Size also goes with long life: and a man who
only lived as long as a fly could not learn much. But there is a limit to
size; a land animal much bigger than an elephant is not, mechanically
speaking, a practical proposition. Man is in that range of size, from 100
Ib. to a ton, which seems to give the best combination of strength, and
mobility. It may be surprising to realize that man's size and mechanical
construction are related to the size of the earth which he inhabits; but
so it is. The force of gravity on Jupiter is so much greater than on our
own planet, that if we lived there our skeletons would have to be much
stronger to support the much increased "weight which we would then
possess, and animals in general would be more stocky; and conversely,
if the earth were only the size of the moon, we could manage with far
less expenditures of material in the form of bone and sinew, and should
be spindly creatures.

Our general construction is determined by the fact that we are made
of living matter, must accordingly be constantly passing a stream of
fresh matter and energy through ourselves if we are to live, and must
as constantly be guarding ourselves against danger if we are not to die.
About 5 per cent of ourselves consists of a tube with attached chemical
factories, for taking in raw materials in the shape of food, and converting
it into the form in which it can be absorbed into our real interior. About
2 per cent consists in arrangements — windpipe and lungs — for getting
oxygen into our system in order to burn the food materials and liberate
energy. About 10 per cent consists of an arrangement for distributing
materials all over the body — the blood and lymph, the tubes which hold
them and the pump which drives them. Much less than 5 per cent is
devoted to dealing with waste materials produced when living substance
breaks down in the process of producing energy to keep our machinery
going — the kidneys and bladder and, in part, the lungs and skin. Over
40 per cent is machinery for moving us about— our muscles; and nearly

562 THE HUMAN MACHINE

20 per cent is needed to support us and to give the mechanical leverage
for our movements — our skeleton and sinews. A relatively tiny fraction
is set apart for giving us information about the outer world — our sense
organs. And there is about 3 per cent to deal with the difficult business
of adjusting our behaviour to what is happening around us. This is the
task of the ductless glands, the nerves, the spinal cord and the brain;
our conscious feeling and thinking is done by a small part of the brain.
Less than i per cent of our bodies is set aside for reproducing the race.
The remainder of our body is concerned with special functions like
protection, carried out by the skin (which is about 7 per cent of our
bulk) and some of the white blood corpuscles; or temperature regula-
tions, carried out by the sweat glands. And nearly 10 per cent of a normal
man consists of reserve food stores in the shape of fat.

Other streams of living matter have developed quite other arrange-
ments in relation to their special environment. Some have parts of them-
selves set aside for manufacturing electricity, like the electric eel, or
light, like the firefly. Some, like • certain termites, are adapted to live
exclusively on wood; others, like cows, exclusively on vegetables. Some
like boa-constrictors, only need to eat every few months; others, like
parasitic worms, need only breathe a few hours a day; others, like some
desert gazelles, need no water to drink. Many cave animals have no eyes;
tapeworms have no mouths or stomachs; and so on and so forth. And
all these peculiarities, including those of our own construction, are related
to the kind of surroundings in which the animal lives.

This relativity of our nature is perhaps most clearly seen in regard to
our senses. The ordinary man is accustomed to think of the information
given by his senses as absolute. So it is — for him; but not in the view
of our Martian scientist. To start with, the particular senses we possess
are not shared by many other creatures. Outside backboned animals, for
instance, very few creatures can hear at all; a few insects and perhaps
a few Crustacea probably exhaust the list. Even fewer animals can see
colours; apparently the world as seen even by most mammals is a black
and white world, not a coloured world. And the majority of animals
do not even see at all in the sense of being given a detailed picture of
the world around. Either they merely distinguish light from darkness,
or at best can get a blurred image of big moving objects. On the other
hand, we are much worse off than many other creatures — dogs, for in-
stance, or some moths — in regard to smell. Our sense of smell is to a
dog's what an eye capable of just distinguishing big moving objects
is to our own eye.

But from another aspect, the relativity of our senses is even more funda-

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 563

mental. Our senses serve to give us information about changes outside
our bodies. Well, what kind of changes are going on in the outside
world? There are ordinary mechanical changes: matter can press against
us, whether in the form of a gentle breeze or a blow from a poker. There
are the special mechanical changes due to vibrations passing through the
air or water around us — these are what we hear. There are changes in
temperature — hot and cold. There are chemical changes — the kind of
matter with which we are L contact alters, as when the air contains
poison gas, or our mouth contains lemonade. There are electrical changes,
as when a current is sent through a wire we happen to be touching.

And there are all the changes depending on what used to be called
vibrations in the ether. The most familiar of these are light- waves; but
they range from the extremely short waves that give cosmic rays and
X-rays, down through ultra-violet to visible light, on to waves of radiant
heat, and so on to the very long Hertzian waves which are used in wire-
less. All these are the same kind of thing, but differ in wave-length.

Now of all these happenings, we are only aware of what appears to be
a very arbitrary selection. Mechanical changes we are aware of through
our sense of touch. Air-vibrations we hear; but not all of them — the
small wave-lengths are pitched too high for our ears, though some of
them can be heard by other creatures, such as dogs and bats. We have
a heat sense and a cold sense, and two kinds of chemical senses for dif-
ferent sorts of chemical changes — taste and smell. But we possess no
special electrical sense — we have no way of telling whether a live rail
is carrying a current or not unless we actually touch it, and then what
we feel is merely pain.

The oddest facts, however, concern light and kindred vibrations. We
have no sense organs for perceiving X-rays, although they may be pour-
ing into us and doing grave damage. We do not perceive ultra-violet
light, though some insects, like bees, can see it. And we have no sense
organs for Hertzian waves, though we make machines — wireless re-
ceivers—to catch them. Out of all this immense range of vibrations, the
only ones of which we are aware through our senses are radiant heat
and light. The waves of radiant heat we perceive through the effect
which they have on our temperature sense organs; and the light- waves we
see. But what we see is only a single octave of the light waves, as opposed
to ten or eleven octaves of sound-waves which we can hear.

This curious state of affairs begins to be comprehensible when we
remember that our sense organs have been evolved in relation to the
world in which our ancestors lived. In nature, there are large-scale
electrical discharges such as lightning, and they act so capriciously and

564 THE HUMAN MACHINE

violently that to be able to detect them would be no advantage. The
same is true of X-rays. The amount of them knocking about under nor-
mal conditions is so small that there is no point in having sense organs
to tell us about them. Wireless waves, on the other hand, are of such
huge wave-lengths that they go right through living matter without
affecting it. Even if they were present in nature, there would be no
obvious way of developing a sense organ to perceive them.

As regards light, there seem to be two reasons why our eyes are limited
to seeing only a single octave of the waves. One is that of the ether
vibrations raying upon the earth's surface from the sun and outer space,
the greatest amount is centered in this region of the spectrum; the in-
tensity of light of higher or lower wave-lengths is much less, and would
only suffice to give us a dim sensation. Our greatest capacity for seeing
is closely adjusted to the amount of light to be seen. The other is more
subtle, and has to do with the properties of light of different wave-
lengths. Ultra-violet light is of so short a wave-length that much of it
gets scattered as it passes through the air, instead of progressing for-
ward in straight lines. Hence a photograph which uses only the ultra-
violet rays is blurred and shows no details of the distance. A photograph
taken by infra-red light, on the other hand, while it shows the distant
landscape very well, over-emphasizes the contrast between light and
shade in the foreground. Leaves and grass reflect all the infra-red, and
so look white, while the shadows are inky-black, with no gradations. The
result looks like a snowscape. An eye which could see the ultra-violet
octave would see the world as in a fog; and one which could see only
the infra-red octave would find it impossible to pick out lurking enemies
in the jet-black shadows. The particular range of light to which our
eyes are attuned gives the best-graded contrast.

Then of course there is the pleasant or unpleasant quality of a sen-
sation; and this, too, is in general related to our way of life. I will take
one example. Both lead acetate and sugar taste sweet; the former is a
poison, but very rare in nature; the latter is a useful food, and common
in nature. Accordingly we most of us find a sweet taste pleasant. But if
lead acetate were as common in nature as sugar, and sugar as rare as
lead acetate, it is safe to prophesy that we should find sweetness a most
horrible taste, because we should only survive if we spat out anything
which tasted sweet.

Now let us turn to another feature of man's life which would probably
seem exceedingly queer to a scientist from another planet — sex. We are so
used to the fact that our race is divided up into two quite different
kinds of individuals, male and female, and that our existence largely

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 565

circles round this fact, that we rarely pause to think about it. But there
is no inherent reason why this should be so. Some kinds of animals
consist only of females; some, like ants, have neuters in addition to the
two sexes; some plants are altogether sexless.

As a matter of fact, the state of affairs as regards human sex is due
to a long and curious sequence of causes. The fundamental fact of sex
has nothing to do with reproduction; it is the union of two living cells
into one. The actual origin of this remains mysterious. Once it had orig-
inated, however, it proved of biological value, by conferring greater
variability on the race, and so greater elasticity in meeting changed con-
ditions. That is why sex is so nearly universal. Later, it was a matter of
biological convenience that reproduction in higher animals became in-
dissolubly tied up with sex. Once this had happened, the force of natural
selection in all its intensity became focused on the sex instinct, because
in the long run those strains which reproduce themselves abundantly
will live on, while those which do not do so will gradually be supplanted.

A wholly different biological invention, the retention of the young
within the mother's body for protection led to the two sexes becoming
much more different in construction and instincts than would otherwise
have been the case. The instinctive choice of a more pleasing as against
a less pleasing mate — what Darwin called sexual selection — led to the
evolution of all kinds of beautiful or striking qualities which in a sex-
less race would never have developed. The most obvious of such char-
acters are seen in the gorgeous plumage of many birds; but sexual
selection has undoubtedly modelled us human beings in many details —
the curves of our bodies, the colours of lips, eyes, cheeks, the hair of our
heads, and the quality of our voices.

Then we should not forget that almost all other mammals and all
birds are, even when adult, fully sexed only for a part of the year: after
the breeding season they relapse into a more or less neuter state. How
radically different human life would be if we too behaved thus! But
man has continued an evolutionary trend begun for some unknown
reason among the monkeys, and remains continuously sexed all the year
round. Hunger and love are the two primal urges of man: but by what
a strange series of biological steps has love attained its position!

We could go on enumerating facts about the relativity of man's physical
construction; but time is short, and I must say a word about his mind.
For that too has developed in relation to the conditions of our life, pres-
ent and past. Many philosophers and theologians have been astonished
at the strength of the feeling which prompts most men and women
to cling to life, to feel that life is worth living, even in the most wretched

566 THE HUMAN MACHINE

circumstances. But to the biologist there is nothing surprising in this.
Those men (and animals) who have the urge to go on living strongly
developed will automatically survive and breed in greater numbers than
those in whom it is weak. Nature's pessimists automatically eliminate
themselves, and their pessimistic tendencies, from the race. A race with-
out a strong will to live could no more hold its own than one without a
strong sexual urge.

Then again man's highest impulses would not exist if it were not for
two simple biological facts — that his offspring are born helpless and must
be protected and tended for years if they are to grow up, and that he is
a gregarious animal. These facts make it biologically necessary for him
to have well-developed altruistic instincts, which may and often do come
into conflict with his egoistic instincts, but are in point of fact responsible
for half of his attitude towards life. Neither a solitary creature like a
cat or a hawk, nor a creature with no biological responsibility towards its
young, like a lizard or a fish, could possibly have developed such strong
altruistic instincts as are found in man.

Other instincts appear to be equally relative. Everyone who has any
acquaintance with wild birds and animals knows how much different
species diflfer in temperament. Most kinds of mice are endowed with a
great deal of fear and very little ferocity; while the reverse is true of
various carnivores like tigers or Tasmanian devils. It would appear that
the amounts of fear and anger in man's emotional make-up are greater
than his needs as a civilized being, and are survivals from an earlier period
of his racial history. In the dawn of man's evolution from apes, a liberal
dose of fear was undoubtedly needed if he was to be preserved from
foolhardiness in a world peopled by wild beasts and hostile tribes, and an
equally liberal dose of anger, the emotion underlying pugnacity, if he
was to triumph over danger when it came. But now they are on the
whole a source of weakness and maladjustment.

It is often said that you cannot change human nature. But that is only
true in the short-range view. In the long run, human nature could as
readily be changed as feline nature has actually been changed in the
domestic cat, where man's selection has produced an amiable animal out
of a fierce ancestral spit-fire of a creature. If, for instance, civilization
should develop in such a way that mild and placid people tended to
have larger families than those of high-strung or violent temperament,
in a few centuries human nature would alter in the direction of mild-
ness. . . .

Pavlov has shown how even dogs can be made to have nervous break-
downs by artificially generating in their minds conflicting urges to two

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN 567

virtually exclusive kinds of action; and we all know that the same thing,
on a higher level of complexity, happens in human beings. But a nerv-
ous breakdown puts an organism out of action for the practical affairs
of life, quite as effectively as does an ordinary infectious disease. And
just as against physical germ-diseases we have evolved a protection in the
shape of the immunity reactions of our blood, so we have evolved ob-
livion as protection against the mental diseases arising out of conflict.
For, generally speaking, what happens is that we forget one of the two
conflicting ideas or motives. We do this either by giving the inconvenient
idea an extra kick into the limbo of the forgotten, which psychologists
call suppression, or else, when it refuses to go so simply, by forcibly keep-
ing it under in the sub-conscious, which is styled repression. For details
about suppression and repression and their often curious and sometimes
disastrous results I must ask you to refer to any modern book on psy-
chology. All I want to point out here is that a special mental machinery
has been evolved for putting inconvenient ideas out of consciousness,
and that the contents and construction of our minds are different in
consequence. . . .

But I have said enough, I hope, to give you some idea of what is im-
plied by calling man a relative being. It implies that he has no real mean-
ing apart from the world which he inhabits. Perhaps this is not quite
accurate. The mere fact that man, a portion of the general stuff of which
the universe is made, can think and feel, aspire and plan, is itself full of
meaning, but the precise way in which man is made, his physical con-
struction, the kinds of feelings he has, the way he thinks, the things he
thinks about, everything which gives his existence form and precision —
all this can only be properly understood in relation to his environment.
For he and his environment make one interlocking whole.

The great advances in scientific understanding and practical control
often begin when people begin asking questions about things which up
till then they have merely taken for granted. If humanity is to be brought
under its own conscious control, it must cease taking itself for granted,
and, even though the process may often be humiliating, begin to examine
itself in a completely detached and scientific spirit.

*933

C THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

The Hippocratic Oath

I SWEAR BY APOLLO PHYSICIAN, BY ASCLEPIUS, BY
Health, by Panacea and by all the gods and goddesses, making them
my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment,
this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my
own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need
of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own
brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without
fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other in-
struction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured
pupils who have taken the physician's oath, but to nobody else. I will use
treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but
never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer
a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a
course. Similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use
the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place
to such as are craftsmen therein. Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will
enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing
and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond
or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profes-
sion, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it
be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge,, holding
such things to be holy secrets. Now if I carry out this oath, and break
it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and
for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the oppo-
site befall me. Estimated between Fifth and First Centuries B.C.

568

Hippocrates, the Greek — the End of Magic

LOGAN CLENDENING

From Behind the Doctor

T))HILISCUS, WHO LIVED BY THE WALL IN ATHENS, LAY

•**• sick of a fever. The year, according to our reckoning, was 410 B.C. The
Battle of Marathon had been fought eighty years before. Athens was still
the greatest city in the world — great in the sunset of its golden age.

The members of Philiscus' family were uneasy about him, for the
malady had not progressed favourably.

They sat sadly on the doorstep awaiting the report of his wife, who had
gone in to help him.

She appeared with an unhappy frown on her brow.

"He doth not know me," she explained. "And he hath not slept. He hath
passed water that is black."

"Ah! I have seen that," exclaimed her father. "It is a bad omen." His
voice sank to a whisper. "I tell you it is the hounds of Hekate that rend
him."

Another elder shook his head.

"It was a sudden affliction that seized him — it came from Pan, or,
mayhap, one of the arrows of Apollo," he averred.

"What physicians have treated him?" inquired this sage, after an interval
of silence.

"Im-Ram, the Egyptian, came by two days ago and gave him an emetic
of white hellebore. But he was no better."

The elder looked stolidly ahead at this. He did not approve of Egyp-
tians or Egyptian remedies. He wanted to placate the angry Apollo.

"Then there was the Babylonian, Mother," the son of Philiscus reminded
her.

"What did he do?" inquired the elder.

"He sacrificed a goat and made divination by the liver."

569

570 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

"Ah! and what did that show?" asked the elder, somewhat more ap-
provingly.

"He laid the liver out and explained it to me carefully," said the son,
eagerly. "There was the lobus dexter and the lobus sinister — and they
were inequal."

"The omens were not clear," sighed the wife.

"And the vesica fellea" continued the lad — "the gall-bladder — it was
full of stones."

"How many?" demanded the old man.

"There were three large ones and many small ones."

"Three?" the elder shook his head, dubiously — "that is grave. One ele-
ment is missing. There should be four."

"Water, perhaps," suggested the wife, "he cries, when he cries sensibly at
all, always for water."

"Fire, air, earth, and water," repeated the old man, sententiously. "The
elements of Pythagoras, the Samian. If one is taken away by the demons
or the hounds of Hekate, it must be replaced. Now here the sick man is
hot and dry — fire is in the ascendancy. Water is cold and moist — just the
opposite. It is water he must have." And he nodded his head emphatically,
pleased with his own reasoning.

"I give him water morning, noon, and night, every hour," answered the
wife, distractedly.

"If we could take him to a temple of Aesculapius," suggested the father-
in-law, "and let the priests treat him."

The wife shook her head. "He is too sick to move," she said, "and out
of his senses — we could not leave him alone."

"I went to a temple once when I was a young man — for this eye," the
old man said, reminiscently. "It was a very good temple, and a very good
treatment, to my way of thought. My eye got better soon after; whereas
before, it had been painful and running like a sore."

"What temple did you go to?" the other old man inquired.

"At Epidaurus — naturally," the narrator replied. "I remember it very
well. The priests of the temple made me cleanse myself first. There was a
bath of salt water, too, as well as the clear water which they made me
enter. Then I purified my soul with prayer. And then the oblation."

"What was your oblation?"

"I was too poor to offer a sheep or a cock, so I offered a popana — a small
cake dipped in oil. The priests sell it to you. Then I starved four days and
was allowed to enter the sanctuary for the incubation sleep."
"What was that?" asked the boy.
"Inside the temple— you slept. There was the great image of Aesculaphx.

HIPPOCRATES, THE GREEK— THE END OF MAGIC 571

at the high altar. It was an awe-inspiring sight. The representation of the
flesh was of ivory, and the rest was of gold enamelled in colours."

By this time he had acquired the attention of his audience, and he
launched into his narrative.

"Sufferers were all over the floor of the temple. Each of us had his
pallet. The night came down and we composed ourselves to sleep. And
whether it was a dream or not I cannot tell, but it seemed to me the god
himself came down from the altar and walked among us. He had two
great yellow snakes and a dog. He stopped a moment at my pallet and
leaned over me. One of the snakes licked my eye. The god put some
ointment in it. And the next day I found a box of ointment at my side.
I took it away with me. And soon my eye was well, and I placed a votive
tablet in the temple."

The youth laughed incredulously.

"Ay!" the elder reproved, "in this age of doubt you fall away from the
old things, but I tell you they are good — those temple rites. I know of
things wrought there that would outdo your modern treatments. While I
was being cured, Proklos, the philosopher, himself, was also there: he was
afflicted with a rheum of his knee — very painful: and he covered it with
a cloth. The night he slept in the temple, a sacred sparrow plucked the
cloth away, and the pain left with it. His knee was as good as ever."

This account of success seemed to impress his audience.

"Yes, you doubt!" he continued. "You doubt the old ways, and you
doubt the old gods. I heard of a new drama of Aristophanes — what is the
name of it — Plutus — played in the theatre of Dionysus — and what does it
amount to ? Making fun of a poor sick person who goes to the temple for
help — that's what. It jests at the priests — says they steal the offerings of
food brought by the patients and eat the food themselves and give it to
the sacred serpents — and all this — " the old man's voice rose excitedly —
"all this played out in the theatre of Dionysus — and the priests do not
interfere. Why, in my time — "

A wild cry from the delirious patient interrupted the discourse. The
wife hurried in to attend her patient.

The boy crept to his grandfather's feet and said : "Grandfather, can we
not fetch the physician Hippocrates to counsel about father?"

"Hippocrates? Yes, I have heard of this healer," assented his grand-
father. "He hath a good name and is highly esteemed."

"He is in Athens now," declared the youth.

"He was the son of a temple priest — I know, I have heard," said the
other old man. "His father was a priest in the Temple of Aesculapius at
Cos. Ah, that is a wonderful temple for healing! If we cannot take

572 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

Philiscus to a temple, the next best thing were to have a priest of the
Asclepiadae come to him."

The wife returned to their circle again, gravely troubled.

"He is worse even than before," she answered their interrogatory glances.

"Think you we could get Hippocrates, the physician, to see him?" asked
her father.

A look of hope came to her face.

"I have heard of that Hippocrates," she answered. "Is he not the one who
treated the Clazomenian who was lodged by the wall of Phynichides?"

"Yes, that was he — now that you recall it to me."

"The Clazomenian was cured."

"He was indeed— and his case is much like that of Philiscus. He had a
pain in the neck and head, and fever. And he could not sleep, and besides,
like Philiscus, he became delirious. He was sick for many days, but this
Hippocrates came to see him every day and wrote down on his tablets the
condition of the patient every day."

"What was his treatment?" asked the elder.

"That I cannot recall, but he prescribed diets and baths, that I know."

"Mayhap he leaves the patient and propitiates a god," suggested the
elder.

"Mayhap, but his method was good in the case of the Clazomenian."

"Let us send for him quickly — quickly," cried the wife. "Who will help
us?"

"I will run through the streets, Mother, and bring him back," said the
boy, eagerly starting off.

The watchers waited impatiently; time seemed to them to pass slowly,
but in reality in a short while the boy returned, leading a radiant stranger,
the physician Hippocrates. He was between forty-five and fifty years of
age — tall, erect, godlike in presence and calmness.

Three young men accompanied him, disciples learning the art. They
were his sons Thessalus and Dracon, and one named Dexippus.

He entered the home of Philiscus gravely, greeted the wife and the two
older men with a smile, and then walked quickly to the bed where the
patient lay.

He put his hand on the sick man's forehead.

"Have you any pain?" he asked.

The patient stared at him vacantly, his lips trembling in a muttering
delirium, and then he suddenly started as if to rise from his bed.

The younger physicians restrained him.

"Has he been delirious long?" Hippocrates asked the wife.

"Since yesterday evening," she answered.

HIPPOCRATES, THE GREEK— THE END OF MAGIC 573

"How long has he been sick?"

"This is the third day. He went to the market-place to discuss some
matter and stood in the sun, and something he said must have incurred
the anger of the god."

Hippocrates lifted his hand to stop her.

"Tell the story just as it happened, without bringing in the gods," he
said, somewhat severely.

The woman looked at him with some fear. Then seeing a reassuring
smile from the physician, she continued:

"He came home and took to his bed. He sweated and was very uneasy
Yesterday, the second day, he was worse in all these points."

"Did he have a stool?" asked Hippocrates.

"Yes, late in the evening — a proper stool from a small clyster."

"Write that down, Dexippus," commanded the master — and "Go on,*
he said to the wife.

"Today he has been much worse. He has been very hot. He trembles;
he sweats and is always thirsty. He hath been delirious on all subjects. He
has passed black water."

"Oh! When was that?" asked the physician, suddenly alert.

"This afternoon."

"Let me see some of it."

A slave boy was summoned and brought an earthen vessel with some
of the sick man's urine in it.

"Notice, my sons," said the physician to his disciples. "The black water
again. We have seen it often this season. And always the prognostic is un-
favourable."

"Anything more to tell us?" he asked, turning again to the wife.

"That is all, I think — O mighty physician, invoke the gods to drive this
devil from my husband."

"Your husband hath no devil — he hath a disease. We will do our best.
More we cannot promise. Pray to the gods, but pray for piety and good
works. Do not ask them for things they cannot grant."

He left some instructions about the patient's diet and recommended
limewater to drink. He instructed the slave in bathing his master by
sponging him with cloth, unless he chilled. He left a draught of medicine
to be given for delirium.

"I will return tomorrow and observe the patient," he announced to the
family. "Let us see now, Dexippus, if you have that description right." He
took the scroll from his pupil and read it.

"Shall we sacrifice to any of the gods?" asked the elder, tremulously.

"I do not practise by the gods," answered Hippocrates. "I try to dis-

574 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

cover the nature of the disease and to follow that. To read nature — believe
me, friend, it is better than relying on the gods."

When he came the next day, the patient was unimproved. The physician
noted all points about his condition and ordered Dexippus to write them
down — which he did.

On the fifth day, however, the patient was worse. There was something
very peculiar about the breathing.

Hippocrates motioned for the members of Philiscus' family to leave the
room. Then "What think you of that breathing?" the physician asked his
pupils.

"It is passing strange," answered Thessalus.

"How would you describe it?" demanded his father.

The young man watched the patient for a few minutes and then said:

"Sometimes it is very rapid and deep — then it becomes shallower."

"Then what?"

"Then it stops altogether for a moment, and then he begins again like a
person recollecting himself."

"That is good," approved the master. "Write that down, Dexippus — a
splendid description — 'like a person recollecting himself.' — Good. There
is no better description I ever heard. See, there it is — like a person recol-
lecting himself.' Have you ever seen it before?"

"Yes — the Thessalonian had something like it."

"Quite true. And what was the outcome of his case?"

"He died."

"So he did. Do you remember anyone else who had it?"

"Was not that woman we saw in the little house yonder breathing in
this way?" inquired Dracon, diffidently.

"She was indeed. Do you not all remember? Exactly the same. And
what was the outcome of her case?"

"She, too, died," answered Dracon.

"That is the rule," said Hippocrates. "I have never seen one recover. So
it will be here. I am sorry, for the wife loves her husband, but the rules of
nature are immutable. Feel the spleen, Thessalus."

"It is large and round," answered Thessalus, after placing his hands on
the abdomen.

"Extremities altogether cold," dictated Hippocrates, for his notes. "The
paroxysms on the even days. Sweats cold throughout. So — "

The physician gave the family such comfort as he could, but his prog-
nosis was fulfilled and Philiscus died that night.

. . . The method of Hippocrates the Greek was to ignore all of the gods.
Disease, he preached, was a part of the order of nature, and to conquer it,

HIPPOCRATES, THE GREEK— THE END OF MAGIC 575

to understand it, one must study it as one does any other natural event.
Many useful facts about treatment and diagnosis and the classification of
disease were gathered together before Hippocrates. But with him the doc-
trine that disease is a natural event and follows natural laws comes out
clear and strong.

That is why Hippocrates is called the Father of Medicine. Yet how long
it took men to learn the simple thing he taught! How many hundreds of
years elapsed between the medicine man and Hippocrates is a matter for
the conjecture of anthropologists. Certainly not less than fifty thousand.
But from his time to ours his influence extends in a clear stream, never
changing in the great essential doctrine that disease is a part of nature.

The case of Philiscus is a good subject of study in order to analyse the
elements which Hippocrates contributed to human thought.

Here we see him in the midst of his regular daily life, expounding by
precept and example those principles. I have tried to show how far ahead
of his time he was — how the older men in the scene harked back to the
superstitions and to the ways of the gods of their youth — to Babylonian
liver prognostication, to the idea of Apollo as the dealer of death, to the
influence of Pan, and to the hounds of Hekate.

How scornful the Hippocratic writings are about the last: "But terrors
which happen during the night, and fevers, and delirium, and jumpings
out of bed, and frightful apparitions and fleeing away — all these they hold
to be the plots of Hekate!"

The case of "Philiscus who lived by the wall," is actual enough. It is the
first of those many little case histories found in Hippocrates — that earliest
collection of clinical cases recorded from the standpoint of science.

The case is described simply day by day. There is no embroidery — sim-
ply the symptoms as they appeared and the outcome of the case.

The name of the patient, the address (by the wall), the circumstances,
are all set down. The picture of the sick man tossing through the hot
Athenian night comes to us across two thousand years, stabbing us like a
personal anxiety.

The peculiarity of breathing which Hippocrates noted — "as of a person
recollecting himself" — is now known as Cheyne-Stokes respiration. It is
a common symptom of approaching death and is due to exhaustion or
lack of oxygenation of the respiratory centre.

Hippocrates as a historical figure, aside from his writings, is very vague.
In this he corresponds to Homer in the epic literature of Greece. It is
doubtful if there was any single personality known as Hippocrates. The
Hippocratic writings are probably the work of many men, the crystalliza-
tion of the thought of a school.

Tradition dates his birth at 460 B.C. Plato mentions him as if he were a

576 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

living man known to him. He is said to have travelled widely, teaching as
he went. He died at Larissa, it was said, at the age of a hundred and ten.

It is difficult for anyone who reads the Hippocratic writings to escape
the conviction that the best of them were the product of a single mind —
their unity of thought, their clarity, their radiance, preclude any other
idea.

The best are the "Aphorisms" — short, descriptive, clinical facts. The
most famous, of course, is the first: "Life is short and art is long."

But "Persons who are naturally very fat are apt to die earlier than those
who are slender" might have a place in a modern life-insurance actuary's
summary of his studies.

"Consumption most commonly occurs between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-five."

"From a spitting of blood there is a spitting of pus" shows that Hip-
pocrates has watched people with tuberculosis of the lungs have as the
initial symptom a hemorrhage and then begin ordinary expectoration.

"Eunuchs do not take the gout nor become bald."

"If a dropsical patient be seized with hiccup, the case is hopeless."

"Anxiety, yawning, and rigour — wine drunk with equal proportions of
water removes these complaints."

Into the domain of treatment also he tried to bring some order.

His diets, for instance, as Dr. Singer points out, were to be prescribed
according to certain sensible rules. First the age of the patient was to be
considered — "Old persons use less nutriment than young." Then the sea-
son— "In winter abundant nourishment is wholesome; in summer a more
frugal diet." The physical state of the patient — "Lean persons should take
little food, but this little should be fat; fat persons, on the other hand,
should take much food, but it should be lean." Digestibility of the food —
"White meat is more digestible than dark."

The typical Greek myth has always seemed to my mind that of Prome-
theus. He stole the fire of the gods from heaven and brought it down to
earth for man's use. The Greeks constantly did that. The Mediterranean
basin was hag-ridden and god-ridden until they appeared. They took the
drama — a service to the god — and they wrenched it away from the god
and subdued it to the services of man. They made it not a service in a
temple, but a story to charm the mind; they filled it with music and danc-
ing and song for their fellow-men's entertainment. So with Hippocrates.
He took once and for ever "the art" — the art of healing. He wrested it
from the gods and made it man's.

With Hippocrates — with all the Greeks— we first find people of our own
kind. We come out, as Osier says — "out of the murky night of the East,

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF VARIOLAE VACCINAE 577

heavy with phantoms, into the bright daylight of the West." Here are men
speaking our words, following our devotions, thinking our thoughts, pur-
suing objects which seems to us worth gaining and to us understandable.

'933

An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae
Vaccinae, Known by the Name of the Cow-Pox

EDWARD JENNER

THE DEVIATION OF MAN FROM THE STATE IN WHICH
he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a
prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indul-
gence of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarized
himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have
been intended for his associates.

The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The
cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally
domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse,
are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion.

There is a disease to which the horse, from his state of domestication, is
frequently subject. The farriers call it the grease. It is an inflammation and
swelling in the heel, from which issues matter possessing properties of a
very peculiar kind, which seems capable of generating a disease in the
human body (after it has undergone the modification which I shall pres-
ently speak of), which bears so strong a resemblance to the smallpox that
I think it highly probable it may be the source of the disease.

In this dairy country a great number of cows are kept, and the office
of milking is performed indiscriminately by men and maid servants. One
of the former having been appointed to apply dressings to the heels of a
horse affected with the grease, and not paying due attention to cleanliness,
incautiously bears his part in milking the cows, with some particles of the

578 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

infectious matter adhering to his fingers. When this is the case, it com-
monly happens that a disease is communicated to the cows, and from the
cows to dairy maids, which spreads through the farm until the most of
the cattle and domestics feel its unpleasant consequences. This disease has
obtained the name of the cow-pox. It appears on the nipples of the cows in
the form of irregular pustules. At their first appearance they are commonly
of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and
are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a
timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers,
which prove extremely troublesome. The animals become indisposed, and
the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear
on different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and
sometimes on the wrists, which quickly run on to suppuration, first assum-
ing the appearance of the small vesications produced by a burn. Most com-
monly they appear about the joints of the fingers and at their extremities;
but whatever parts are affected, if the situation will admit, these superficial
suppurations put on a circular form, with their edges more elevated than
their centre, and of a colour distantly approaching to blue. Absorption
takes place, and tumours appear in each axilla. The system becomes
affected — the pulse is quickened; and shiverings, succeeded by heat, with
general lassitude and pains about the loins and limbs, with vomiting, come
on. The head is painful, and the patient is now and then even affected with
delirium. These symptoms, varying in their degrees of violence, generally
continue from one day to three or four, leaving ulcerated sores about the
hands, which, from the sensibility of the parts, are very troublesome, and
commonly heal slowly, frequently becoming phagedenic, like those from
whence they sprung. The lips, nostrils, eyelids, and other parts of the
body are sometimes affected with sores; but these evidently arise from their
being heedlessly rubbed or scratched with the patient's infected fingers.
No eruptions on the skin have followed the decline of the feverish symp-
toms in any instance that has come to my inspection, one only excepted,
and in this case a very few appeared on the arms: they were very minute,
of a vivid red colour, and soon died away without advancing to matura-
tion; so that I cannot determine whether they had any connection with
the preceding symptoms.

Thus the disease makes its progress from the horse to the nipple of the
cow, and from the cow to the human subject.

Morbid matter of various kinds, when absorbed into the system, may
produce effects in some degree similar; but what renders the cow-pox virus
so extremely singular is that the person who has been thus affected is
forever after secure from the infection of the smallpox; neither exposure

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF VARIOLAE VACCINAE 579

to the variolous effluvia, nor the insertion of the matter into the skin,
producing this distemper.

In support of so extraordinary a fact, I shall lay before my reader a great
number of instances.

Case I. Joseph Merret, now as under gardener to the Earl of Berkeley,
lived as a servant with a farmer near this place in the year 1770, and occa-
sionally assisted in milking his master's cows. Several horses belonging to
the farm began to have sore heels, which Merret frequently attended. The
cows soon became affected with the cow-pox, and soon after several sores
appeared on his hands. Swellings and stiffness in each axilla followed, and
he was so much indisposed for several days as to be incapable of pursuing
his ordinary employment. Previously to the appearance of the distemper
among the cows there was no fresh cow brought into the farm, nor any
servant employed who was affected with the cow-pox.

In April, 1795, a general inoculation taking place here, Merret was
inoculated with his family; so that a period of twenty-five years had
elapsed from his having the cow-pox to this time. However, though the
variolous matter was repeatedly inserted into his arm, I found it imprac-
ticable to infect him with it; an efflorescence only, taking on an erysipe-
latous look about the centre, appearing on the skin near the punctured
parts. During the whole time that his family had the smallpox, one of
whom had it very full, he remained in the house with them, but received
no injury from exposure to the contagion.

It is necessary to observe that the utmost care was taken to ascertain,
with the most scrupulous precision, that no one whose case is here adduced
had gone through the smallpox previous to these attempts to produce that
disease.

Had these experiments been conducted in a large city, or in a populous
neighborhood, some doubts might have been entertained; but here, where
population is thin, and where such an event as a person's having had the
smallpox is always faithfully recorded, no risk of inaccuracy in this par-
ticular can arise.

Case II. Sarah Portlock, of this place, was infected with the cow-pox
when a servant at a farmer's in the neighborhood, twenty-seven years ago.

In the year 1792, conceiving herself, from this circumstance, secure from
the infection of the smallpox, she nursed one of her own children who had
accidentally caught the disease, but no indisposition ensued. During the
time she remained in the infected room, variolous matter was inserted into
both her arms, but without any further effect than in the preceding case.

Case XVII. The more accurately to observe the progress of the infection
I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inocu-

580 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

lating for the cow-pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of
a dairymaid, who was infected by her master's cows, and it was inserted
on the i4th day of May, 1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two
superficial incisions, barely penetrating the cutis, each about an inch long.

On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla and on the
ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight headache.
During the whole of this day he was perceptibly indisposed, and spent the
night with some degree of restlessness, but on the day following he was
perfectly well.

The appearance of the incisions in their progress to a state of matura-
tion were much the same as when produced in a similar manner by
variolous matter. The difference which I perceived was in the state of the
limpid fluid arising from the action of the virus, which assumed rather a
darker hue, and in that of the efflorescence spreading round the incisions,
which had more of an erysipelatous look than we commonly perceive
when variolous matter has been made use of in the same manner; but the
whole died away (leaving on the inoculated parts scabs and subsequent
eschars) without giving me or my patient the least trouble.

In order to ascertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an affection
of the system from the cow-pox virus, was secure from the contagion of
the smallpox, he was inoculated the ist of July following with variolous
matter, immediately taken from a pustule. Several slight punctures and
incisions were made on both his arms, and the matter was carefully in-
serted, but no disease followed. The same appearances were observable on
the arms as we commonly see when a patient has had variolous matter
applied, after having either the cow-pox or smallpox. Several months after-
wards he was again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect
was produced on the constitution.

After the many fruitless attempts to give the smallpox to those who had
had the cow-pox, it did not appear necessary, nor was it convenient to me,
to inoculate the whole of those who had been the subjects of these late
trials; yet I thought it right to see the effects of variolous matter on some
of them, particularly William Summers, the first of these patients who had
been infected with matter taken from the cow. He was, therefore, inocu-
lated from a fresh pustule; but, as in the preceding cases, the system did
not feel the effects of it in the smallest degree. I had an opportunity also
of having this boy and William Pead inoculated by my nephew, Mr. Henry
Jenner, whose report to me is as follows: "I have inoculated Pead and
Barge, two of the boys whom you lately infected with the cow-pox. On the
second day the incisions were inflamed and there was a pale inflammatory

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF VARIOLAE VACCINAE 581

stain around them. On the third day these appearances were still increasing
and their arms itched considerably. On the fourth day the inflammation
was evidently subsiding, and on the sixth day it was scarcely perceptible.
No symptoms of indisposition followed.

"To convince myself that the variolous matter made use of was in a per-
fect state I at the same time inoculated a patient with some of it who never
had gone through the cow-pox, and it produced the smallpox in the usual
regular manner."

These experiments afforded me much satisfaction; they proved that the
matter, in passing from one human subject to another, through five grada-
tions, lost none of its original properties, J. Barge being the fifth who
received the infection successively from William Summers, the boy to
whom it was communicated from the cow. . . ,

Although I presume it may not be necessary to produce further testi-
mony in support of my assertion "that the cow-pox protects the human
constitution from the infection of the smallpox," yet it affords me con-
siderable satisfaction to say that Lord Somerville, the President of the
Board of Agriculture, to whom this paper was shown by Sir Joseph Banks,
has found upon inquiry that the statements were confirmed by the con-
curring testimony of Mr. Dolland, a surgeon, who resides in a dairy coun-
try remote from this, in which these observations were made. . . ,

7798

The History of the Kine-pox, Commonly
Called the Cow-pox

WITH AN ACCOUNT OF A SERIES OF INOCULATIONS

PERFORMED FOR THE KINE-POX IN

MASSACHUSETTS

BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE

CHAPTER I

IN THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1799 I RECEIVED FROM
my friend Dr. Lettsom of London, a copy of Dr. Edward Jenner's
"Inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae, or Cow-pox";
a disease totally unknown in this quarter of the world. On perusing this
work I was struck with the unspeakable advantages that might accrue
to this, and indeed to the human race at large, from the discovery of a mild
distemper that would ever after secure the constitution from that terrible
scourge, the smallpox.

As the ordinary mode of communicating even medical discoveries in
this country is by newspapers, I drew up the following account of the
Cow-pox, which was printed in the Columbian Centinal March 12, 1799.

SOMETHING CURIOUS IN THE MEDICAL LINE

Everybody has heard of these distempers accompanied by pocks and
pustules, called the small-pox, and chickenpox and the swinepox, but few
have ever heard of the cow-pox, or if you like the term better, the cow
small-pox; or to express it in technical language, the variolae vaccinae.
There is however such a disease which has been noticed here and there in
several parts of England, more particularly in Gloucestershire, for sixty or
seventy years past, but has never been an object of medical inquiry until
lately.

This variolae vaccinae is very readily communicated to those who milk
cows infected with it. This malady appears on the teats of the cows. . . .
Those who milk the cows thus affected, seldom or ever fail catching the

582

THE HISTORY OF THE KINE-POX 583

distemper, if there be cracks, wounds or abrasions of the hands. . . . But
what makes this newly discovered disease so very curious, and so extremely
important is that every person thus affected is EVER AFTER SECURED FROM THE
ORDINARY SMALLPOX, let him be ever so much exposed to the cffluvian of it,
or let ever so much ripe matter be inserted into the s\in by inoculation*

Dr. Edward Jenner is the physician in England who has collected and
arranged a series of facts and experiments respecting the disease there
called the Cow-pox.

CHAPTER II

Under the serious impression of effecting a public benefit, and con-
ceiving it moreover a duty in my official situation in this University, I
sent to England for some of the vaccine, or cow-pox matter for trial. After
several fruitless attempts, I obtained some by a short passage from Bristol,
and with it I inoculated all the younger part of my family.

The first of my children that I inoculated was a boy of five years old,
named Daniel Oliver Waterhouse. I made a slight incision in the usual
place for inoculation in the arm, inserted a small portion of the infected
thread, and covered it with a sticking plaster. It exhibited no other appear-
ances than what would have arisen from any other extraneous substance,
until the sixth day when an increased redness called forth my attention.
On the eighth day he complained of pain under the inoculated arm and on
the ninth the inoculated part exhibited evident signs of virulency. By the
tenth anyone much experienced in the inoculated small-pox would have
pronounced the arm infected. The pain and swelling under his arm went
on gradually encreasing and by the eleventh day from inoculation his
febrile symptoms were pretty strongly marked. The sore in the arm pro-
ceeded exactly as Drs. Jenner and Woodville described, and appeared to
the eye very like the second plate in Dr. Jenner's elegant publication.

The inoculated part in this boy was surrounded by an efflorescence
which extended from his shoulder to his elbow, which made it necessary to
apply some remedies to lessen it; but the "symptoms," as they are called,
scarcely drew him from his play more than an hour or two; and he went
through the disease in so light a manner as hardly even to express any
marks of peevishness. A piece of true skin was fairly taken out of the arm
by the virus, the part appearing as if eaten out by a caustick, a never failing
sign of thorough section of the system by the inoculated small-pox.

Satisfied with the appearances and symptoms in this boy I inoculated
another of three years of age with matter taken from his brother's arm, for
he had no pustules on his body. He likewise went through the disease in a

584 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

perfect and very satisfactory manner. The child pursued his amusement?
with as little interruption as his brother. Then I inoculated a servant boy
of about 12 years of age, with some of the infected thread from England.
His arm was pretty sore and his symptoms pretty severe. He treated him-
self rather harshly by exercising unnecessarily in the garden when the
weather was extremely hot (Fahrt. Therm. 96 in the shade!) and then
washing his head and upper parts of his body under the pump, and set-
ting, in short, all rules at defiance in my absence. Nevertheless this boy
went through the disorder without any other accident than a sore throat
and a stiffness of the muscles of the neck. All which soon vanished by the
help of a few remedies.

Being obliged to go from home a few days, I requested my colleague
Dr. Warren to visit these children. Dr. Danforth as well as some other
physicians, came to Boston out of curiosity, and so did several practitioners
from the country. I mention this because it gave rise to a groundless report,
that one of the children had so bad an arm that I thought it prudent to
take the advice of some of my brethren upon it.

From a full matured pustule in my little boy three years old I inocu-
lated his infant sister, already weaned, of one year. At the same time and
from the same pustule, I inoculated its nursery maid. They both went
through the disease with equal regularity. . . .

CHAPTER III

Having thus traced the most important facts respecting the causes and
effects of the Kine-pox up to their source in England, and having con-
firmed most of them by actual experiment in America, one experiment
only remained behind to complete the business. To effect this I wrote the
following letter to Dr. Aspinwall, physician to the smallpox hospital in
the neighborhood of Boston.

Cambridge, August 2, 1800
Dear Doctor :

You have doubtless heard of the newly discovered disorder, known in
England by the name of cow-pox, which so nearly resembles the smallpox,
that it is now agreed in Great Britain, that the former will pass for the
latter.

I have procured some of the vaccine matter, and therewith inoculated
seven of my family. The inoculation has proceeded in six of them exactly
as described by Woodville and Jenner; but my desire is to confirm the
doctrine by having some of them inoculated by you.

I can obtain variolous matter and inoculate them privately, but I wish

THE HISTORY OF THE KINE-POX 585

to do it in the most open and public way possible. As I have imported a
new distemper, I conceive that the public have a right to know exactly
every step I take in it. I write this, then to enquire whether you will on
philanthropic principles try the experiment of inoculating some of my
children who have already undergone the cow-pox. If you accede to my
proposal, I shall consider it as an experiment in which we have co-operated
for the good of our fellow citizens, and relate it as such in the pamphlet I
mean to publish on the subject.
I am, etc.

B.W.

Hon. William Aspinwall, Esq.
Brookline.

To this letter the doctor returned a polite answer, assuring me of his
readiness to give any assistance in his power, to ascertain whether the cow-
pox would prevent the small-pox; observing that he had at that time fresh
matter that he could depend on, and desiring me to send the children to
the hospital for that purpose. Of the three which I offered, the doctor chose
to try the experiment on the boy of 12 years of age, whom he inoculated
in my presence by two punctures, and with matter taken that moment
from a patient who had it pretty full upon him. He at the same time
inserted an infected thread and then put him into the hospital, where was
one patient wi^h it the natural way. On the fourth day, the doctor pro-
nounced the arm to be infected. It became every hour sorer, but in a day
or two it died off, and grew well, without producing the slightest trace of
a disease; so that the boy was dismissed from the hospital and returned
home the twelfth day after the experiment. One fact, in such cases, is worth
a thousand arguments.

1800

Louis Pasteur and The Conquest of Rabies

REN£ VALLERY-RADOT

From The Life of Pasteur

A MIDST THE VARIOUS RESEARCHES UNDERTAKEN IN
•*•»• his laboratory, one study was placed by Pasteur above every other,
one mystery constantly haunted his mind — that of hydrophobia. When
he was received at the Academic Fran^aise, Renan, hoping to prove him-
self a prophet for once, said to him: "Humanity will owe to you deliver-
ance from a horrible disease and also from a sad anomaly: I mean the
distrust which we cannot help mingling with the caresses of the animal
in whom we see most of nature's smiling benevolence."

The two first mad dogs brought into the laboratory were given to Pas-
teur, in 1880, by M. Bourrel, an old army veterinary surgeon who had
long been trying to find a remedy for hydrophobia. He had invented a pre-
ventive measure which consisted in filing down the teeth of dogs, so that
they should not bite into the skin; in 1874, he had written that vivisection
threw no light on that disease, the laws of which were "impenetrable to
science until now." It now occurred to him that, perhaps, the investigators
in the laboratory of the Ecole Normale might be more successful than he
had been in his kennels in the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi.

One of the two dogs he sent was suffering from what is called dumb
madness: his jaw hung, half opened and paralyzed, his tongue was cov-
ered with foam, and his eyes full of wistful anguish; the other made fero-
cious darts at anything held out to him, with a rabid fury in his bloodshot
eyes, and, in the hallucinations of his delirium, gave vent to haunting,
despairing howls.

Much confusion prevailed at that time regarding this disease, its seat,
its causes, and its remedy. Three things seemed positive: firstly, that the
rabic virus was contained in the saliva of the mad animals; secondly, that
it was communicated through bites; and thirdly, that the period of incuba-
tion might vary from a few days to several months. Clinical observation

586

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 587

was reduced to complete impotence; perhaps experiments might throw
some light on the subject. . . .

One day, Pasteur having wished to collect a little saliva from the jaws
of a rabid dog, so as to obtain it directly, two of Bourrel's assistants under-
took to drag a mad bulldog, foaming at the mouth, from its cage; they
seized it by means of a lasso, and stretched it on a table. These two men,
thus associated with Pasteur in the same danger, with the same calm hero-
ism, held the struggling, ferocious animal down with their powerful
hands, whilst the scientist drew, by means of a glass tube held between
his lips, a few drops of the deadly saliva.

But the same uncertainty followed the inoculation of the saliva; the in-
cubation was so slow that weeks and months often elapsed whilst the re-
sult of an experiment was being anxiously awaited. Evidently the saliva
was not a sure agent for experiments, and if more knowledge was to be
obtained, some other means had to be found of obtaining it.

Magendie and Renault had both tried experimenting with rabic blood,
but with no results, and Paul Bert had been equally unsuccessful. Pasteur
tried in his turn, but also in vain. "We must try other experiments," he
said, with his usual indefatigable perseverance.

As the number of cases observed became larger, he felt a growing con-
viction that hydrophobia has its seat in the nervous system, and partic-
ularly in the medulla oblongata. "The propagation of the virus in a rabid
dog's nervous system can almost be observed in its every stage," writes M.
Roux, Pasteur's daily associate in these researches, which he afterwards
made the subject of his thesis. "The anguish and fury due to the excitation
of the grey cortex of the brain are followed by an alteration of the voice
and a difficulty in deglutition. The medulla oblongata and the nerves start-
ing from it are attacked in their turn; finally, the spinal cord itself be-
comes invaded and paralysis closes the scene."

As long as the virus has not reached the nervous centres, it may sojourn
for weeks or months in some point of the body; this explains the slowness
of certain incubations, and the fortunate escapes after some bites from
rabid dogs. The a priori supposition that the virus attacks the nervous cen-
tres went very far back; it had served as a basis tc a theory enunciated by
Dr. Duboue (of Pau), who had, however, not supported it by any experi-
ments. On the contrary, when M. Galtier, a professor at the Lyons Vet-
erinary School, had attempted experiments in that direction, he had to in-
form the Academy of Medicine, in January, 1881, that he had only ascer-
tained the existence of virus in rabid dogs in the lingual glands and in the
buccopharyngeal mucous membrane. "More than ten times, and always
unsuccessfully, have I inoculated the product obtained by pressure of the

588 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

cerebral substances of the cerebellum or of the medulla oblongata of rabid
dogs."

Pasteur was about to prove that it was possible to succeed by operating
in a special manner, according to a rigorous technique, unknown in other
laboratories. When the post-mortem examination of a mad dog had re-
vealed no characteristic lesion, the brain was uncovered, and the surface
of the medulla oblongata scalded with a glass stick, so as to destroy any
external dust or dirt. Then, with a long tube previously put through a
flame, a particle of the substance was drawn and deposited in a glass just
taken from a stove heated up to 200° C., and mixed with a little water or
sterilized broth by means of a glass agitator, also previously put through a
flame. The syringe used for inoculation on the rabbit or dog (lying ready
on the operating board) had been purified in boiling water.

Most of the animals who received this inoculation under the skin suc-
cumbed to hydrophobia; that virulent matter was therefore more success-
ful than the saliva, which was a great result obtained.

"The seat of the rabic virus," wrote Pasteur, "is therefore not in the
saliva only: the brain contains it in a degree of virulence at least equal to
that of the saliva of rabid animals." But, to Pasteur's eyes, this was but a
preliminary step on the long road which stretched before him; it was nec-
essary that all the inoculated animals should contract hydrophobia, and
the period of incubation had to be shortened.

It was then that it occurred to Pasteur to inoculate the rabic virus di-
rectly on the surface of a dog's brain. He thought that, by placing the virus
from the beginning in its true medium, hydrophobia would more surely
supervene and the incubation might be shorter. The experiment was at-
tempted : a dog under chloroform was fixed to the operating board, and a
small, round portion of the cranium removed by means of a trephine (a
surgical instrument somewhat similar to a fret-saw); the tough fibrous
membrane called the dura-mater, being thus exposed, was then injected
with a small quantity of the prepared virus, which lay in readiness in a
Pravaz syringe. The wound was washed with carbolic and the skin
stitched together, the whole thing lasting but a few minutes. The dog, on
returning to consciousness, seemed quite the same as usual. But, after four-
teen days, hydrophobia appeared : rabid fury, characteristic howls, the tear-
ing up and devouring of his bed, delirious hallucination, and finally,
paralysis and death.

A method was therefore found by which rabies was contracted surely
and swiftly. Trephinings were again performed on chloroformed animals
— Pasteur had a great horror of useless sufferings, and always insisted on

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 589

anaesthesia. In every case, characteristic hydrophobia occurred after inocula-
tion on the brain. The main lines of this complicated question were be-
ginning to be traceable; but other obstacles were in the way. Pasteur could
not apply the method he had hitherto used, i.e. to isolate, and then to culti-
vate in an artificial medium, the microbe of hydrophobia, for he failed in
detecting this microbe. Yet its existence admitted of no doubt; perhaps it
was beyond the limits of human sight. "Since this unknown being is liv-
ing," thought Pasteur, "we must cultivate it; failing an artificial medium,
let us try the brain of living rabbits; it would indeed be an experimental
feat!"

As soon as a trephined and inoculated rabbit died paralyzed, a little of
his rabic medulla was inoculated to another; each inoculation succeeded
another, and the time of incubation became shorter and shorter, until,
after a hundred uninterrupted inoculations, it came to be reduced to seven
days. But the virus, having reached this degree, the virulence of which
was found to be greater than that of the virus of dogs made rabid by an
accidental bite, now became fixed; Pasteur had mastered it. He could now
predict the exact time when death should occur in each of the inoculated
animals; his predictions were verified with surprising accuracy.

Pasteur was not yet satisfied with the immense progress marked by in-
fallible inoculation and the shortened incubation; he now wished to de-
crease the degrees of virulence — when the attenuation of the virus was
once conquered, it might be hoped that dogs could be made refractory to
rabies. Pasteur abstracted a fragment of the medulla from a rabbit which
had just died of rabies after an inoculation of the fixed virus; this frag-
ment was suspended by a thread in a sterilized phial, the air in which
was kept dry by some pieces of caustic potash lying at the bottom of the
vessel and which was closed by a cotton-wool plug to prevent the entrance
of atmospheric dusts. The temperature of the room where this desiccation
took place was maintained at 23° C. As the medulla gradually became dry,
its virulence decreased, until, at the end of fourteen days, it had become
absolutely extinguished. This now inactive medulla was crushed and
mixed with pure water, and injected under the skin of some dogs. The
next day they were inoculated with medulla which had been desiccating
for thirteen days, and so on, using increased virulence until the medulla
was used of a rabbit dead the same day. These dogs might now be bitten
by rabid dogs given them as companions for a few minutes, or submitted
to the intracranial inoculations of the deadly virus: they resisted both.

Having at last obtained this refractory condition, Pasteur was anxious
that his results should be verified by a Commission. The Minister of Pub-
lic Instruction acceded to this desire, and a Commission was constituted

590 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

in May, 1884, composed of Messrs. Beclard, Dean of the Faculty of Med-
icine, Paul Bert, Bouley, Villemin, Vulpian, and Tisserand, Director of the
Agricultural Office. The Commission immediately set to work; a rabid
dog having succumbed at Alfort on June i, its carcase was brought to the
laboratory of the Ecole Normale, and a fragment of the medulla oblon-
gata was mixed with some sterilized broth. Two dogs, declared by Pas-
teur to be refractory to rabies, were trephined, and a few drops of the
liquid injected into their brains; two other dogs and two rabbits received
inoculations at the same time, with the same liquid and in precisely the
same manner.

Bouley was taking notes for a report to be presented to the Minister:

"M. Pasteur tells us that, considering the nature of the rabic virus used,
the rabbits and the two new dogs will develop rabies within twelve or fif-
teen days, and that the two refractory dogs will not develop it at all, how-
ever long they may be detained under observation."

On May 29, Mme. Pasteur wrote to her children:

"The Commission on rabies met to-day and elected M. Bouley as chair-
man. Nothing is settled as to commencing experiments. Your father is
absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and, in one
word, continues the life I began with him this day thirty-five years ago."

On June 3, Bourrel sent word that he had a rabid dog in the kennels of
the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi; a refractory dog and a new dog were immedi-
ately submitted to numerous bites; the latter was violently bitten on the
head in several places. The rabid dog, still living the next day and still
able to bite, was given two more dogs, one of which was refractory; this
dog, and the refractory dog bitten on the 3rd, were allowed to receive the
first bites, the Commission having thought that perhaps the saliva might
then be more abundant and more dangerous.

On June 6, the rabid dog having died, the Commission proceeded to
inoculate the medulla of the animal into six more dogs, by means of tre-
phining. Three of those dogs were refractory; the three others were fresh
from the kennels; there were also two rabbits.

On the loth, Bourrel telegraphed the arrival of another rabid dog, and
the same operations were gone through.

"This rabid, furious dog," wrote Pasteur to his son-in-law, "had spent
the night lying on his master's bed; his appearance had been suspicious for
a day or two. On the morning of the roth, his voice became rabietic, and
his master, who had heard the bark of a rabid dog twenty years ago, was
seized with terror, and brought the dog to M. Bourrel, who found that he
was indeed in the biting stage of rabies. Fortunately a lingering fidelity
had prevented him from attacking his master. . . .

"This morning the rabic condition is beginning to appear on one of the

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 591

new dogs trephined on June i, at the same time as two refractory dogs.
Let us hope that the other new dog will also develop it and that the two
refractory ones will resist."

At the same time that the Commission examined this dog which devel-
oped rabies within the exact time indicated by Pasteur, the two rabbits on
whom inoculation had been performed at the same time were found to
present the first symptoms of rabic paralysis. "This paralysis," noted Bou-
ley, "is revealed by great weakness of the limbs, particularly of the hind
quarters; the least shock knocks them over and they experience great diffi-
culty in getting up again." The second new dog on whom inoculation had
been performed on June i was now also rabid; the refractory dogs were in
perfect health. . . .

Bouley's report was sent to*the Minister of Public Instruction at the be-
ginning of August. "We submit to you to-day," he wrote, "this report on
the first series of experiments that we have just witnessed, in order that M.
Pasteur may refer to it in the paper which he proposes to read at the Co-
penhagen International Scientific Congress on these magnificent results,
which devolve so much credit on French Science and which give it a fresh
claim to the world's gratitude."

The Commission wished that a large kennel yard might be built, in
order that the duration of immunity in protected dogs might be timed, and
that other great problem solved, viz., whether it would be possible, through
the inoculation of attenuated virus, to defy the virus from bites.

By the Minister's request, the Commission investigated the Meudon
woods in search of a favourable site; an excellent place was found in the
lower part of the Park, away from dwelling houses, easy to enclose and
presumably in no one's way. But, when the inhabitants of Meudon heard
of this project, they protested vehemently, evidently terrified at the thought
of rabid dogs, however securely bound, in their peaceful neighbourhood.

Another piece of ground was then suggested to Pasteur, near St. Cloud,
in the Park of Villeneuve PEtang. Originally a State domain, this prop-
erty had been put up for sale, but had found no buyer, not being suitable
for parcelling out in small lots; the Bill was withdrawn which allowed of
its sale and the greater part of the domain was devoted by the Ministry to
Pasteur's and his assistants' experiments on the prophylaxis of contagious
diseases. . . .

. . . Pasteur pondered on the means of extinguishing hydrophobia or of
merely diminishing its frequency. Could dogs be vaccinated? There are
100,000 dogs in Paris, about 2,500,000 more in the provinces: vaccination
necessitates several preventive inoculations; innumerable kennels would

592 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

have to be built for the purpose, to say nothing of the expense of keeping
the dogs and of providing a trained staflE capable of performing the diffi-
cult and dangerous operations. And, as M. Nocard truly remarked, where
were rabbits to be found in sufficient number for the vaccine emulsions?

Optional vaccination did not seem more practicable; it could only be
worked on a very restricted scale and was therefore of very little use in a
general way.

The main question was the possibility of preventing hydrophobia from
occurring in a human being, previously bitten by a rabid dog. , . .

The successful opposition of the inhabitants of Meudon had inspired
those of St. Cloud, Ville d'Avray, Vaucresson, Marnes, and Garches with
the idea of resisting in their turn the installation of Pasteur's kennels at
Villeneuve 1'Etang. People spoke of public danger, of children exposed to
meet ferocious rabid dogs wandering loose about the park, of popular
Sundays spoilt, picnickers disturbed, etc., etc. . . .

Little by little, in spite of the opposition which burst out now and again,
calm was again re-established. French good sense and appreciation of
great things got the better of the struggle; in January, 1885, Pasteur was
able to go to Villeneuve 1'Etang to superintend the arrangements. The old
stables were turned into an immense kennel, paved with asphalt. A wide
passage went from one end to the other, on each side of which accommo-
dation for sixty dogs was arranged behind a double barrier of wire netting.

The subject of hydrophobia goes back to the remotest antiquity; one of
Homer's warriors calls Hector a mad dog. The supposed allusions to it to
be found in Hippocrates are of the vaguest, but Aristotle is quite explicit
when speaking of canine rabies and of its transmission from one animal
to the other through bites. He gives expression, however, to the singular
opinion that man is not subject to it. More than three hundred years later
we come to Celsus, who describes this disease, unknown or unnoticed until
then. "The patient," said Celsus, "is tortured at the same time by thirst and
by an invincible repulsion towards water." He counselled cauterization of
the wound with a red-hot iron and also with various caustics and cor-
rosives.

Pliny the Elder, a worthy precursor of village quacks, recommended the
livers of mad dogs as a cure; it was not a successful one. Galen, who op-
posed this, had a no less singular recipe, a compound of cray-fish eyes.
Later, the shrine of St. Hubert in Belgium was credited with miraculous
cures; this superstition is still extant.

Sea bathing, unknown in France until the reign of Louis XIV, became

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 593

a fashionable cure for hydrophobia, Dieppe sands being supposed to offer
wonderful curing properties.

In 1780 a prize was offered for the best method of treating hydrophobia,
and won by a pamphlet entitled Dissertation sur la Rage, written by a sur-
geon-major of the name of Le Roux.

This very sensible treatise concluded by recommending cauterization,
now long forgotten, instead of the various quack remedies which had so
long been in vogue, and the use of butter of antimony.

Le Roux did not allude in his paper to certain tenacious and cruel prej-
udices, which had caused several hydrophobic persons, or persons merely
suspected of hydrophobia, to be killed like wild beasts, shot, poisoned,
strangled, or suffocated.

It was supposed in some places that hydrophobia could be transmitted
through the mere contact of the saliva or even by the breath of the vic-
tims; people who had been bitten were in terror of what might be done to
them. A girl, bitten by a mad dog and taken to the Hotel Dieu Hospital
on May 8, 1780, begged that she might not be suffocated!

Those dreadful occurrences must have been only too frequent, for, in
1810, a philosopher asked the Government to enact a Bill in the follow-
ing terms: "It is forbidden, under pain of death, to strangle, suffocate,
bleed to death, or in any other way murder individuals suffering from
rabies, hydrophobia, or any disease causing fits, convulsions, furious and
dangerous madness; all necessary precautions against them being taken by
families or public authorities."

In 1819, newspapers related the death of an unfortunate hydrophobe,
smothered between two mattresses; it was said a propos of this murder
that "it is the doctor's duty to repeat that this disease cannot be transmit-
ted from man to man, and that there is therefore no danger in nursing
hydrophobia patients." Though old and fantastic remedies were still in
vogue in remote country places, cauterization was the most frequently em-
ployed; if the wounds were somewhat deep, it was recommended to use
long, sharp and pointed needles, and to push them well in, even if the
wound was on the face.

One of Pasteur's childish recollections (it happened in October, 1831)
was the impression of terror produced throughout the Jura by the advent
of a rabid wolf who went biting men and beasts on his way. Pasteur had
seen an Arboisian of the name of Nicole being cauterized with a red-hot
iron at the smithy near his father's house. The persons who had been bit-
ten on the hands and head succumbed to hydrophobia, some of them
amidst horrible sufferings; there were eight victims in the immediate

594 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

neighbourhood. Nicole was saved. For years the whole region remained
in dread of that mad wolf. . . .

As to the origin of rabies, it remained unknown and was erroneously
attributed to divers causes. Spontaneity was still believed in. Bouley him-
self did not absolutely reject the idea of it, for he said in 1870: "In the im-
mense majority of cases, this disease proceeds from contagion; out of 1,000
rabid dogs, 999 at least owe their condition to inoculation by a bite."

Pasteur was anxious to uproot this fallacy, as also another very serious
error, vigorously opposed by Bouley, by M. Nocard, and by another vet-
erinary surgeon in a Manual on Rabies, published in 1882, and still as
tenacious as most prejudices, viz., that the word hydrophobia is synony-
mous with rabies. The rabid dog is not hydrophobe, he does not abhor
water. The word is applicable to rabid human beings, but is false concern-
ing rabid dogs.

Many people in the country, constantly seeing Pasteur's name associated
with the word rabies, fancied that he was a consulting veterinary surgeon,
and pestered him with letters full of questions. What was to be done to a
dog whose manner seemed strange, though there was no evidence of a
suspicious bite? Should he be shot? ''No," answered Pasteur, "shut him up
securely, and he will soon die if he is really mad." Some dog owners hesi-
tated to destroy a dog manifestly bitten by a mad dog. "It is such a good
dog!" "The law is absolute," answered Pasteur; "every dog bitten by a
mad dog must be destroyed at once." And it irritated him that village
mayors should close their eyes to the non-observance of the law, and thus
contribute to a recrudescence of rabies.

Pasteur wasted his precious time answering all those letters. On March
28, 1885, he wrote to his friend Jules Vercel —

"Alasl we shall not be able to go to Arbois for Easter; I shall be busy for
some time settling down, or rather settling my dogs down at Villeneuve
1'Etang. I also have some new experiments on rabies on hand which will
take some months. I am demonstrating this year that dogs can be vac-
cinated, or made refractory to rabies after they have been bitten by mad
dogs.

"I have not yet dared to treat human beings after bites from rabid dogs;
but the time is not far off, and I am much inclined to begin by myself —
inoculating myself with rabies, and then arresting the consequences; for
I am beginning to feel very sure of my results." . . .

In May, everything at Villeneuve 1'Etang was ready for the reception of
sixty dogs. Fifty of them, already made refractory to bites or rabic inocula-
tion, were successively accommodated in the immense kennel, where each

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 595

had his cell and his experiment number. They had been made refractory
by being inoculated with fragments of medulla, which had hung for a
fortnight in a phial, and of which the virulence was extinguished, after
which further inoculations had been made, gradually increasing in viru-
lence until the highest degree of it had again been reached.

All those dogs, which were to be periodically taken back to Paris for
inoculations or bite tests, in order to see what was the duration of the im-
munity conferred, were stray dogs picked up by the police. They were of
various breeds, and showed every variety of character, some of them gen-
tle and affectionate, others vicious and growling, some confiding, some
shrinking, as if the recollection of chloroform and the laboratory was dis-
agreeable to them. They showed some natural impatience of their en-
forced captivity, only interrupted by a short daily run. One of them, how-
ever, was promoted to the post of house-dog, and loosened every night; he
excited much envy among his congeners. The dogs were very well cared
for by a retired gendarme, an excellent man of the name of Pernin.

A lover of animals might have drawn an interesting contrast between
the fate of those laboratory dogs, living and dying for the good of human-
ity, and that of the dogs buried in the neighbouring dogs' cemetery at
Bagatelle, founded by Sir Richard Wallace, the great English philanthro-
pist. Here lay toy dogs, lap dogs, drawing-room dogs, cherished and cod-
dled during their useless lives, and luxuriously buried after their useless
deaths, while the dead bodies of the others went to the knacker's yard.

Rabbit hutches and guinea-pig cages leaned against the dogs' palace.
Pasteur, having seen to the comfort of his animals, now thought of him-
self; it was frequently necessary that he should come to spend two or
three days at Villeneuve PEtang. The official architect thought of repair-
ing part of the little palace of Villeneuve, which was in a very bad state
of decay. But Pasteur preferred to have some rooms near the stables put
into repair, which had formerly been used for non-commissioned officers
of the Cent Gardes; there was less to do to them, and the position was
convenient. The roof, windows, and doors were renovated, and some cheap
paper hung on the walls inside. "This is certainly not luxurious!" ex-
claimed an astonished millionaire, who came to see Pasteur one dav on his
way to his own splendid villa at Marly.

On May 29 Pasteur wrote to his son —

"I thought I should have done with rabies by the end of April; I must
postpone my hopes till the end of July. Yet I have not remained stationary;
but, in these difficult studies, one is far from the goal as long as the last
word, the last decisive proof is not acquired. What I aspire to is the pos-
sibility of treating a man after a bite with no fear of accidents.

596 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

"I have never had so many subjects of experiments on hand — sixty dogs
at Villeneuve PEtang, forty at Rollin, ten at Fregis', fifteen at Bourrel's,
and I deplore having no more kennels at my disposal.

"What do you say of the Rue Pasteur in the large city of Lille ? The news
has given me very great pleasure."

What Pasteur briefly called "Rollin" in this letter was the former Lycee
Rollin, the old buildings of which had been transformed into outhouses
for his laboratory. Large cages had been set up in the old courtyard, and
the place was like a farm, with its population of hens, rabbits, and guinea-

Two series of experiments were being carried out on those 125 dogs.
The first consisted in making dogs refractory to rabies by preventive inoc^
ulations; the second in preventing the onset of rabies in dogs bitten or
subjected to inoculation. . . .

On Monday, July 6, Pasteur saw a little Alsatian boy, Joseph Meister,
enter his laboratory, accompanied by his mother. He was only nine years
old, and had been bitten two days before by a mad dog at Meissengott,
near Schlestadt.

The child, going alone to school by a little by-road, had been attacked by
a furious dog and thrown to the ground. Too small to defend himself, he
had only thought of covering his face with his hands. A bricklayer, seeing
the scene from a distance, arrived, and succeeded in beating the dog off
with an iron bar; he picked up the boy, covered with blood and saliva.
The dog went back to his master, Theodore Vone, a grocer at Meissengott,
whom he bit on the arm. Vone seized a gun and shot the animal, whose
stomach was found to be full of hay, straw, pieces of wood, etc. When
little Meister's parents heard all these details they went, full of anxiety, to
consult Dr. Weber, at Ville, that same evening. After cauterizing the
wounds with carbolic, Dr. Weber advised Mme. Meister to start for Paris,
where she could relate the facts to one who was not a physician, but who
would be the best judge of what could be done in such a serious case.
Theodore Vone, anxious on his own and on the child's account, decided
to come also.

Pasteur reassured him; his clothes had wiped off the dog's saliva, and his
shirt-sleeve was intact. He might safely go back to Alsace, and he promptly
did so.

Pasteur's emotion was great at the sight of the fourteen wounds of the
little boy, who suffered so much that he could hardly walk. What should
he do for this child? could he risk the preventive treatment which had
been constantly successful on his dogs? Pasteur was divided between his

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 597

hopes and his scruples, painful in their acuteness. Before deciding on a
course of action, he made arrangements for the comfort of this poor woman
and her child, alone in Paris, and gave them an appointment for 5 o'clock,
after the Institute meeting. He did not wish to attempt anything without
having seen Vulpian and talked it over with him. Since the Rabies Com-
mission had been constituted, Pasteur had formed a growing esteem for
the great judgment of Vulpian, who, in his lectures on the general and
comparative physiology of the nervous system, had already mentioned the
profit to human clinics to be drawn from experimenting on animals.

His was a most prudent mind, always seeing all the aspects of a prob-
lem. The man was worthy of the scientist: he was absolutely straightfor-
ward, and of a discreet and active kindness. He was passionately fond of
work, and had recourse to it when smitten by a deep sorrow.

Vulpian expressed the opinion that Pasteur's experiments on dogs were
sufficiently conclusive to authorize him to foresee the same success in hu-
man pathology. Why not try this treatment? added the professor, usually
so reserved. Was there any other efficacious treatment against hydropho-
bia? If at least the cauterizations had been made with a red-hot iron! but
what was the good of carbolic acid twelve hours after the accident. If the
almost certain danger which threatened the boy were weighed against the
chances of snatching him from death, Pasteur would see that it was more
than a right, that it was a duty to apply antirabic inoculation to little
Meister.

This Was also the opinion of Dr. Grancher, whom Pasteur consulted.
M. Grancher worked at the laboratory; he and Dr. Straus might claim to
be the two first French physicians who took up the study of bacteriology;
these novel studies fascinated him, and he was drawn to Pasteur by the
deepest admiration and by a strong affection, which Pasteur thoroughly
reciprocated.

Vulpian and M. Grancher examined little Meister in the evening, and,
seeing the number of bites, some of which, on one hand especially, were
very deep, they decided on performing the first inoculation immediately;
the substance chosen was fourteen days old and had quite lost its virulence :
it was to be followed by further inoculations gradually increasing in
strength.

It was a very slight operation, a mere injection into the side (by means
of a Pravaz syringe) of a few drops of a liquid prepared with some frag-
ments of medulla oblongata. The child, who cried very much before the
operation, soon dried his tears when he found the slight prick was all that
he had to undergo.

Pasteur had had a bedroom comfortably arranged for the mother and

598 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

child in the old Rollin College, and the little boy was very happy amidst
the various animals — chickens, rabbits, white mice, guinea-pigs, etc.; he
begged and easily obtained of Pasteur the life of several of the youngest of
them.

"All is going well," Pasteur wrote to his son-in-law on July n: "the
child sleeps well, has a good appetite, and the inoculated matter is ab-
sorbed into the system from one day to another without leaving a trace.
It is true that I have not yet come to the test inoculations, which will take
place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If the lad keeps well during
the three following weeks, I think the experiment will be safe to succeed.
I shall send the child and his mother back to Meissengott (near Schlestadt)
in any case on August i, giving these good people detailed instruction as
to the observations they are to record for me. I shall make no statement
before the end of the vacation."

But, as the inoculations were becoming more virulent, Pasteur became a
prey to anxiety: "My dear children," wrote Mme. Pasteur, "your father
has had another bad night; he is dreading the last inoculations on the
child. And yet there can be no drawing back now! The boy continues in
perfect health."

Renewed hopes were expressed in the following letter from Pasteur —

My dear Rene, I think great things are coming to pass. Joseph Meister
has just left the laboratory. The three last inoculations have left some pink
marks under the skin, gradually widening and not at all tender. There is
some action, which is becoming more intense as we approach the final in-
oculation, which will take place on Thursday, July 16. The lad is very well
this morning, and has slept well, though slightly restless; he has a good
appetite and no feverishness. He had a slight hysterical attack yesterday.

The letter ended with an affectionate invitation. "Perhaps one of the
great medical facts of the century is going to take place; you would regret
not having seen it!"

Pasteur was going through a succession of hopes, fears, anguish, and an
ardent yearning to snatch little Meister from death; he could no longer
work. At nights, feverish visions came to him of this child whom he had
seen playing in the garden, suffocating in the mad struggles of hydro-
phobia, like the dying child he had seen at the Hopital Trousseau in 1880.
Vainly his experimental genius assured him that the virus of that most ter-
rible of diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was about to
be delivered from this dread horror — his human tenderness was stronger
than all, his accustomed ready sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties
of others was for the nonce centered in "the dear lad."

The treatment lasted ten days; Meister was inoculated twelve times.

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 599

The virulence of the medulla used was tested by trephinings on rabbits,
and proved to be gradually stronger. Pasteur even inoculated on July 16,
at ii A.M., some medulla only one day old, bound to give hydrophobia to
rabbits after only seven days' incubation; it was the surest test of the
immunity and preservation due to the treatment.

Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gaily running about
as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue eyes
now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last inocula-
tion; in the evening, after claiming a kiss from "Dear Monsieur Pasteur,"
as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully. Pasteur spent a ter-
rible night of insomnia; in those slow dark hours of night when all vision
is distorted, Pasteur, losing sight of the accumulation of experiments which
guaranteed his success, imagined that the little boy would die.

The treatment being now completed, Pasteur left little Meister to the
care of Dr. Grancher (the lad was not to return to Alsace until July 27)
and consented to take a few days' rest. He spent them with his daughter
in a quiet, almost deserted country place in Burgundy, but without how-
ever finding much restfulness in the beautiful peaceful scenery; he lived
in constant expectation of Dr. Grancher 's daily telegram or letter contain-
ing news of Joseph Meister.

By the time he went to the Jura, Pasteur's fears had almost disappeared.
He wrote from Arbois to his son August 3, 1885: "Very good news last
night of the bitten lad. I am looking forward with great hopes to the time
when I can draw a conclusion. It will be thirty-one days to-morrow since
he was bitten."

. . . On his return to Paris, Pasteur found himself obliged to hasten the
organization of a "service" for the preventive treatment of hydrophobia
after a bite. The Mayor of Villers-Farlay, in the Jura, wrote to him that,
on October 14, a shepherd had been cruelly bitten by a rabid dog.

Six little shepherd boys were watching over their sheep in a meadow;
suddenly they saw a large dog passing along the road, with hanging, foam-
ing jaws.

"A mad dog!" they exclaimed. The dog, seeing the children, left the
road and charged them; they ran away shrieking, but the eldest of them,
J. B. Jupille, fourteen years of age, bravely turned back in order to pro-
tect the flight of his comrades. Armed with his whip, he confronted the
infuriated animal, who flew at him and seized his left hand. Jupille, wres-
tling with the dog, succeeded in kneeling on him, and forcing his jaws
open in order to disengage his left hand; in so doing, his right hand was
seriously bitten in its turn; finally, having been able to get hold of the ani-

600 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

mal by the neck, Jupille called to his little brother to pick up his whip
which had fallen during the struggle, and securely fastened the dog's jaws
with the lash. He then took his wooden sabot, with which he battered the
dog's head, after which, in order to be sure that it could do no further
harm, he dragged the body down to a little stream in the meadow, and
held the head under water for several minutes. Death being now certain,
and all danger removed from his comrades, Jupille returned to Villers-
Farlay.

Whilst the boy's wounds were being bandaged, the dog's carcase was
fetched, and a necropsy took place the next day. The two veterinary sur-
geons who examined the body had not the slightest hesitation in declar-
ing that the dog was rabid.

The Mayor of Villers-Farlay, who had been to see Pasteur during the
summer, wrote to tell him that this lad would die a victim of his own
courage unless the new treatment intervened. The answer came immedi-
ately: Pasteur declared that, after five years' study, he had succeeded in
making dogs refractory to rabies, even six or eight days after being bitten;
that, he had only once yet applied his method to a human being, but that
once with success, in the case of little Meister, and that, if Jupille's family
consented, the boy might be sent to him. "I shall keep him near me in a
room of my laboratory; he will be watched and need not go to bed; he
will merely receive a daily prick, not more painful than a pin-prick."

The family, on hearing this letter, came to an immediate decision; but,
between the day when he was bitten and Jupille's arrival in Paris, six
whole days had elapsed, whilst in Meister's case there had only been two
and a half!

Yet, however great were Pasteur's fears for the life of this tall lad, who
seemed quite surprised when congratulated on his courageous conduct,
they were not what they had been in the first instance — he felt much
greater confidence.

A few days later, on October 26, Pasteur in a statement at the Academy
of Sciences described the treatment followed for Meister. Three months
and three days had passed, and the child remained perfectly well. Then he
spoke of his new attempt. Vulpian rose—

"The Academy will not be surprised," he said, "if, as a member of the
Medical and Surgical Section, I ask to be allowed to express the feelings
of admiration inspired in me by M. Pasteur's statement. I feel certain that
those feelings will be shared by the whole of the medical profession.

"Hydrophobia, that dread disease against which all therapeutic measures
had hitherto failed, has at last found a remedy. M. Pasteur, who has been
preceded by no one in this path, has been led by a series of investigations

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 601

unceasingly carried on for several years, to create a method of treatment,
by means of which the development of hydrophobia can infallibly be pre-
vented in a patient recently bitten by a rabid dog. I say infallibly, because,
after what I have seen in M. Pasteur's laboratory, I do not doubt the con-
stant success of this treatment when it is put into full practice a few days
only after a rabic bite." . . .

Bouley, then chairman of the Academy, rose to speak in his turn —

"We are entitled to say that the date of the present meeting will remain
for ever memorable in the history of medicine, and glorious for French
science; for it is that of one of the greatest steps ever accomplished in the
medical order of things — a progress realized by the discovery of an effica-
cious means of preventive treatment for a disease, the incurable nature of
which was a legacy handed down by one century to another. From this
day, humanity is armed with a means of fighting the fatal disease of hydro-
phobia and of preventing its onset. It is to M. Pasteur that we owe this,
and we could not feel too much admiration or too much gratitude for the
efforts on his part which have led to such a magnificent result. . . ."

As soon as Pasteur's paper was published, people bitten by rabid
dogs began to arrive from all sides to the laboratory. The "service" of
hydrophobia became the chief business of the day. Every morning was
spent by Eugene Viala in preparing the fragments of marrow used for
inoculations: in a little room permanently kept at a temperature of 20° to
23° C., stood rows of sterilized flasks, their tubular openings closed by
plugs of cotton wool. Each flask contained a rabic marrow, hanging from
the stopper by a thread and gradually drying up by the action of some frag-
ments of caustic potash lying at the bottom of the flask. Viala cut those
marrows into small pieces by means of scissors previously put through a
flame, and placed them in small sterilized glasses; he then added a few
drops of veal broth and pounded the mixture with a glass rod. The vac-
cinal liquid was now ready; each glass was covered with a -paper cover,
and bore the date of the medulla used, the earliest of which was fourteen
days old. For each patient under the treatment from a certain date, there
was a whole series of little glasses. . . . The date and circumstances of the
bites and the veterinary surgeon's certificate were entered in a register,
and the patients were divided into series according to the degree of viru-
lence which was to be inoculated on each day of the period of treatment.

Pasteur took a personal interest in each of his patients, helping those
who were poor and illiterate to find suitable lodgings in the great capital.
Children especially inspired him with a loving solicitude. But his pity was
mingled with terror, when, on November 9, a little girl of ten was brought
to him who had been severely bitten on the head by a mountain dog, on

602 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

October 3, thirty-seven days before! The wound was still suppurating. He
said to himself, "This is a hopeless case: hydrophobia is no doubt about to
appear immediately; it is much too late for the preventive treatment to
have the least chance of success. Should I not, in the scientific interest of
the method, refuse to treat this child? If the issue is fatal, all those who
have already been treated will be frightened, and many bitten persons,
discouraged from coming to the laboratory, may succumb to the disease!"
These thoughts rapidly crossed Pasteur's mind. But he found himself un-
able to resist his compassion for the father and mother, begging him to try
and save their child.

After the treatment was over, Louise Pelletier had returned to school,
when fits of breathlessness appeared, soon followed by convulsive spasms;
she could swallow nothing. Pasteur hastened to her side when these symp-
toms began, and new inoculations were attempted. On December 2, there
was a respite of a few hours, moments of calm which inspired Pasteur
with the vain hope that she might yet be saved. This delusion was a short-
lived one. Pasteur spent the day by little Louise's bedside, in her parents'
rooms in the Rue Dauphine. He could not tear himself away; she herself,
full of affection for him, gasped out a desire that he should not go away,
that he should stay with her! She felt for his hand between two spasms.
Pasteur shared the grief of the father and mother. When all hope had to
be abandoned: "I did so wish I could have saved your litde one!" he said.
And as he came down the staircase, he burst into tears.

He was obliged, a few days later, to preside at the reception of Joseph
Bertrand at the Academic Fran^aise; his sad feelings little in harmony
with the occasion. He read in a mournful and troubled voice the speech
he had prepared during his peaceful and happy holidays at Arbois. Henry
Houssaye, reporting on this ceremony in the Journal des Debats, wrote,
"M. Pasteur ended his speech amidst a torrent of applause, he received a
veritable ovation. He seemed unaccountably moved. How can M. Pasteur,
who has received every mark of admiration, every supreme honour, whose
name is consecrated by universal renown, still be touched by anything save
the discoveries of his powerful genius?" People did not realize that Pas-
teur's thoughts were far away from himself and from his brilliant discov-
ery. He was thinking of the child he had been unable to snatch from the
jaws of death; his mind was not with the living, but with the dead.

A telegram from New York having announced that four children, bit-
ten by rabid dogs, were starting for Paris, many adversaries who had heard
of Louise Pelletier's death were saying triumphantly that, if those chil-
dren's parents had known of her fate, they would have spared them so
long and useless a journey.

LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES 603

The four little Americans belonged to workmen's families and were sent
to Paris by means of a public subscription opened in the columns of the
New Yorf^ Herald; they were accompanied by a doctor and by the mother
of the youngest of them, a boy only five years old. After the first inocula-
tion, this little boy, astonished at the insignificant prick, could not help
saying, "Is this all we have come such a long journey for?" The children
were received with enthusiasm on their return to New York, and were
asked "many questions about the great man who had taken such care of
them."

A letter dated from that time (January 14, 1886) shows that Pasteur yet
found time for kindness, in the midst of his world-famed occupations.

"My dear Jupille, I have received your letters, and I am much pleased
with the news you give me of your health. Mme. Pasteur thanks you for
remembering her. She, and every one at the laboratory, join with me in
wishing that you may keep well and improve as much as possible in read-
ing, writing and arithmetic. Your writing is already much better than it
was, but you should take some pains with your spelling. Where do you go
to school? Who teaches you? Do you work at home as much as you
might? You know that Joseph Meister, who was first to be vaccinated,
often writes to me; well, I think he is improving more quickly than you
are, though he is only ten years old. So, mind you take pains, do not waste
your time with other boys, and listen to the advice of your teachers, and of
your father and mother. Remember me to M. Perrot, the Mayor of Vil-
lers-Farlay. Perhaps, without him, you would have become ill, and to be
ill of hydrophobia means inevitable death; therefore you owe him much
gratitude. Good-bye. Keep well."

Pasteur's solicitude did not confine itself to his two first patients, Joseph
Meister and the fearless Jupille, but was extended to all those who had
come under his care; his kindness was like a living flame. The very little
ones who then only saw in him a "kind gentleman" bending over them
understood later in life, when recalling the sweet smile lighting up his seri-
ous face, that Science, thus understood, unites moral with intellectual
grandeur.

Edition of 1920

Leprosy In the Philippines

VICTOR REISER

From An American Doctor's Odyssey

TLJUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LEPERS STILL EXIST
-**• JL throughout the world as social pariahs, thrust out of society because
they have, through no fault of their own, contracted a repulsive disease.
Far beyond their physical suffering is their terrible mental anguish.
No criminal condemned to solitary confinement is confronted with such
torture and loneliness. Shunned by friends and acquaintances, who are in
terror of even coming within speaking distance, the unfortunate victims
soon find themselves alone in a world in which they have no part. The few
who come in contact with lepers instinctively draw back from them, so
that normal social relationship dies at birth. Patients, when avoided by
everybody, sit idle and brood; a human being devoid of hope is the
most terrible object in the world.

The treatment of cases of leprosy today is sometimes as inhuman as in
former times. In India a leper is often cast out by his own relatives, and
has to go to the government for relief. The Karo-Bataks of the East
Coast of Sumatra expel a leper from their villages, and at night surround
and set fire to his hut, burning him alive. The Yakuts of Siberia, in their
great terror of leprosy, force the leper to leave the community, and he
must henceforth live alone unless he finds some other leper to keep him
company.

Even in the United States lepers have not always been treated kindly.
The people of a West Virginia town, when they once found a leper,
placed him in a box car and nailed the door shut. The train departed.
It was in the middle of winter, and before the door was finally opened,
the man had starved and frozen to death. . . .

Leprosy never breaks fresh ground unless it has been introduced
from without by a leper; and a sure and safe way of stamping it out
is by isolation. For example, lepers were unknown in Hawaii until

604

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 605

1859, but thirty-two years later one out of thirty of the population was
leprous. A Chinese introduced the disease into New Caledonia in 1865,
and four thousand cases grew up in twenty-three years. The first instance
in the Loyalty Islands was in 1882, and on one tiny islet six years later
there were seventy cases. . . .

Leprosy is one of the most repulsive ailments that afflicts man. Of
the two main types, one, the neural or anesthetic, exhibits little out-
ward evidence, and the other, the cutaneous or hypertrophic, is marked
by lesions which form on the surface tissues. The two types often occur
together. In neither are the lesions confined to a single tissue.

The first signs of leprosy are often indicated by an enlargement of
the lobe of the ear, or an infiltration or ulcer of the septum of the nose.
Then erythematous, or red spots commonly appear, on which all sorts
of ointment are apt to be tried, none of which is efficacious. When
I have described these symptoms at lectures, I have often noticed how
here and there a member of the audience would feel his ear. Occasion-
ally after one of these addresses I have had someone come knocking
at my hotel door late at night, saying "Doctor, I seem to have a nodule in
my ear. I want to have an examination to see whether I have leprosy."

Leprosy begins insidiously, progresses slowly, and may last for twenty
or thirty years. Aretaeus, a Greek physician of Cappadocia who came
to Rome in the First Century A.D., wrote an account of the disease which
holds true today:

"Shining tubercles of different size, dusky red or livid in color, on face,
ears and extremities, together with a thickened and rugous state of the
skin, a diminution or total loss of its sensibility, and a falling off of all
the hair except that of the scalp. The alae of the nose become swollen,
the nostrils dilate, the lips are tumid; the external ears, especially the
lobes, are enlarged and thickened and beset with tubercles; the skin of
the cheek and of the forehead grows thick and tumid and forms large and
prominent rugae, especially over the eyes; the hair of the eyebrows, beard,
pubes, and axillae falls off; the voice becomes hoarse and obscure, and the
sensibility of the parts affected is obtuse or totally abolished, so that pinch-
ing or puncturing gives no uneasiness. This disfiguration of the countenance
suggests the idea of the features of a satyr, or wild beast, hence the disease
is, by some, called satyriasis, or by others leontiasis. As the malady pro-
ceeds, the tubercles crack and ultimately ulcerate. Ulcerations also appear
in the throat and nose, which sometimes destroy the palate and septum, the
nose falls, and the breath is intolerably offensive; the fingers and toes
gangrene, and separate joint after joint."

606 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

Anesthesia among lepers is extremely common. I have often seen a
lighted cigarette burning into the fingers of a leper without his being
at all aware of it. Even the odor of burning flesh did not attract his
attention because the sense of smell was also gone.

Anesthetic leprosy attacks the trophic nerves, which carry impulses
throughout the body, causing the blood to bring essential elements to
damaged tissue. Ordinarily, if the fingers of a well person are merely
drawn across a piece of paper, a few surface cells of the skin are rubbed
off. But nature telegraphs by means of these trophic nerves to head-
quarters that tissue has been removed, and at once the blood supply
opens, the repair is made, and the hand heals. But this telegraph system
in lepers is completely out of order. Nature is not aware that any cells
have been removed, and the result is they are not replaced, but are gone
forever. Lepers frequently have worn their hands down until they are
no more than bats.

Wounds in anesthetic cases heal with great difficulty. A slight injury,
such as caused by running a thorn in the foot, often starts an un-
healable ulcer that produces a deep hole and discharges foul pus. We
keep such wounds dressed and try to make them bleed, but the ulcers
often become so bad that the bone is exposed and the feet often have
to be amputated. A characteristic lesion is interosseous atrophy, where
the tissue between the bones at the back of the hand is absorbed.

The anesthesia is not accompanied by paralysis, because the motor
nerves are not affected and still retain their functions. The nerves of
the eye are sometimes attacked, often resulting in frightful suffering
from iritis. The larynx may be affected and the voice becomes hoarse.

Leprosy is horrible to live with and difficult to die with. Death seldom
comes unless from some other cause. The average life of a leper
is probably about ten years after the disease first becomes apparent.
At Culion a pathological survey of the causes of death showed that
twenty-four percent died of tuberculosis and sixteen percent of nephritis.
The mortality at the colony was high, but it was believed to be
materially lower than it would have been among these people in their
homes. Many of them had been beggars and wholly dependent upon
public charity for their living. The great majority of cases during
the early years were so far advanced when admitted that they were
practically beyond human aid.

There are usually two male for one female leper. Why this is so
no one has been able to tell. When I visited any leper colony for the
first time I used to ask, "How many men have you?"

"We have two hundred."

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 607

"Then you have one hundred women."

The invariable reply was, "Yes."

Gerhard Armauer Hansen, a Norwegian doctor of Bergen, in the
early 1870'$ first proved leprosy due to a bacillus. This microbe, which
usually grows in bundles of rectilinear sticks resembling the Chinese
puzzle, is too small to be seen with the naked eye. Whenever this
bacillus can be demonstrated in the tissues, it may be stated beyond
question that leprosy is present. Scientists have tried to advance the
study of leprosy by attempting to transmit it to guinea pigs, Japanese
dancing mice, rats, and monkeys, but without success because no
animal contracts it. They have also attempted to isolate and cultivate the
lepra bacillus in the test tube. Many have claimed to have succeeded, but
their claims so far are open to question because the experiment could
not be satisfactorily repeated by others

We have learned how leprosy affects the body but not why. As in
tuberculosis, we still lack the knowledge to attack the disease by break-
ing a link in the chain of transmission. Nobody knows how leprosy is
contracted, except that it apparently requires prolonged intimate con-
tact. Because the incubation period is unknown also, one of the dis-
quieting features of handling lepers is the long period which may elapse
before the disease manifests itself. The shortest known time is about two
years, and in some cases it has been over twenty. This makes it
extremely difficult to obtain any positive proof as to the exact time
at which the disease was acquired. . . .

Something more than ordinary contact is apparently necessary be-
fore transmission can take place. What this is we do not know. But it
is also true that leprosy does not occur in areas in which there is no
leper. This fundamental fact was the foundation stone on which I
built my policy.

The segregation of lepers has been subjected to much criticism in
the past. Many have held that attempts at rigid isolation have generally
defeated their own ends because victims of the disease were driven into
hiding, whereas if treatment were offered and assurance given that
there would be no forcible detention, lepers would voluntarily apply for
medical attention and thus open cases could be rendered much less
communicable. However widely eminent medical men may differ upon
this question, the incontrovertible fact remains that every leper who is
capable of giving off lepra bacilli is at least one center of infection if
the bacilli can find suitable soil in which to lodge. . . .

When I became Director of Health of the Philippines I realized
that one of my most important duties would be to isolate the lepers

608 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

whose numbers were estimated anywhere from ten to thirty thou-
sand, although officially a little less than four thousand were recorded.
There were twelve hundred new cases developing every year and
practically nothing was being done about them.

Segregation is always cruel. We did not want to separate husband
and wife or children and parents. But segregation is cruel to relatively
few whereas non-segregation threatens an entire people. I believed that
isolation not only protected others from contracting leprosy but, further-
more, was the most humane solution for the leper himself. Instead of
being shunned and rebuffed by the world, he could have an opportunity
to associate with others of his kind in pleasant relationship. In the
Philippines the lepers were sensitive and proud and quick to notice
any infringement upon their human rights.

Among the Filipinos family ties are unbelievably strong. Every
step would have to be taken most tactfully; otherwise the Filipinos
would conceal their lepers, or even actively oppose segregation. First,
the colony would have to be prepared, and, then, the Islanders would
have to be educated to the benefits of the plan.

Almost at the very inception of the civil government, negotiations
had been carried on which led to the setting aside of Culion Island for
a leper colony. Culion is one of the Calamianes group between the
Sulu and China Seas, two hundred miles southwest of Manila. It is
twenty miles long and twelve miles at its widest point. The population
was then about eight hundred; more than half were harmless, wild
Tagbuanas, without fixed abode or title to land beyond that of pos-
session. Outside the town of Culion there were only eight small
houses. . . .

The problem of Culion was one of the most arduous which faced
me when I took office. I became wholly responsible for the under-
taking, which proved more difficult than I could ever have antici-
pated, even in my wildest dreams. The actual building began in 1905.
Every imaginable type of social question presented itself. Not only
houses and a hospital had to be constructed and separate quarters for
the non-lepers built, but streets had to be laid out, wharves con-
structed, buoys planted, a sewer system installed, amusement halls and
a postoffice planned. Arrangements had to be made for public order,
for municipal ordinances, for banking, and for disinfecting letters. . . .

In May, 1906, we prepared to transfer the three hundred and
sixty-five inmates of the San Lazaro Hospital at Cebu to Culion. Often,
before and afterwards, we had to contend with fear. A government boat
had been set aside for the purpose, but as we were about to sail the

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 609

entire crew deserted. Only the chief engineer and the skipper, a Maine
Yankee named Tom Hillgrove stuck to the ship. Even after a new
crew had, with great pains, been assembled, I had qualms about setting
forth over the treacherous waters of the China Sea, because the skipper
had fortified himself with such huge quantities of alcohol. But he was
so good a navigator that he was equal to all emergencies, and we
arrived safely at Culion, where Father Valles, a Jesuit priest, and four
Sisters of the order of St. Paul de Chartres were on hand to receive the
lepers.

I wanted to popularize Culion so that the lepers who were at large
would come there willingly. I had photographs taken of the colony, and
even moving picture reels made, a great achievement in those days,
showing how attractive it was. I invited leaders of public thought
to come to the Island, trusting they would write home about it to their
friends. Agents were sent to the various towns to explain the purpose
of Culion, and tell the lepers what they would find there, the type of
house they would live in, the food they would eat, and the facilities for
treatment. The Filipino is cautious, and not many came at first. But
those who were persuaded found they were much better off than at
home. The first two years we received enough volunteers to tax all our
resources. . . .

Many municipalities used to try to evade their responsibilities by
presenting for transfer to Culion their insane, blind, cripples, and other
incurables who had become public charges, and some were surprised
and pained when we rejected them. In the first collections only about
half those reported as lepers were authentic cases.

In the early days the very word leprosy struck unreasoning terror
into the hearts of those suspected, and a number went into hiding. There
was a young leper girl in Cebu whom the local authorities were never
able to produce when we arrived. Finally her brother was stricken and
taken to Culion. On our next visit she gave herself up voluntarily. When
I asked her how she had eluded us so long, she explained that the tele-
graph operator was her friend, and had informed her in advance when
we were due. She would then speed away to a cave back in the hills
where she had always had enough food cached to last her until we had
gone.

I have never seen remorse that equaled hers. Her heart was broken.
I used to talk with her each time I visited Culion, and each time she
would say to me, "I thought I was fooling you and all the time the only
person I fooled was myself. I infected my brother, and if only I had
given myself up it would never have happened."

610 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

One of our most prolific sources of information as to evaders was the
anonymous communication. If a Filipino wants to secure revenge on
an enemy, he spies upon him until he discovers some evidence to report
to the authorities. Curiously enough such delations as we received were,
in the main, correct. On one occasion we were told that if we were to
go to a certain house in the center of Manila, and knock three times,
and then again once, a trap door in the ceiling would open, and there
we would find a leper. We followed these instructions, and found the
leper. Somebody had a grudge against his family, and was trying to
get even.

The anonymous letter writer was not always accurate, however. We
once received information that the son of a mayor in a small provincial
town was ill with leprosy. When we went to the house we found him in
bed with all his clothes on. There was nothing wrong with him but
malaria and a skin rash. We furnished him quinine and a cake of soap,
with the stern advice to use both. He recovered shortly.

The Filipino is also likely to be unscrupulous when he is attempting
to secure a political advantage. When I arrived one day at a small town,
the mayor reported he had all the local lepers ready in waiting. On the
way to the detention building one of the prominent citizens approached
me and asked me to help him, saying his daughter, who was perfectly
healthy, had been shut up with the lepers. Since this was a very common
story, I was not particularly impressed, but told him I would look into it.
I was somewhat surprised to find that he was right. His daughter, a
beautiful girl, had been herded into camp with real lepers, although she
had not the slightest sign of the disease. I ordered her released and then
demanded of the local health officer, "Why did you lock her up?*'
"The mayor told me to, and I have to obey his orders."
"But what reason did he have?"

"Her father is a candidate. The present mayor thought he could win
the election if he could brand his rival's daughter with the stigma of
leprosy."

At the very inception of gathering up the lepers it became our fixed
policy not to confine anyone at Culion from whom leprosy bacilli could
not be recovered and demonstrated by microscopial examination. Fili-
pinos had so many skin diseases that an occasional mistake might easily
have been made in diagnosing non-lepers as lepers. We never placed
anyone on the ship until from three to five leprosy experts, acting as a
Board, were unanimously satisfied that the man or woman had leprosy.
If we erred it was on the side of safety, but, as far as I know, no mistake
was ever made. The reason more cases are now being found is that since

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 611

those days many refinements in diagnosis have been made. The more
recent complete knowledge is of great value because the early stages of
the disease are the most infective.

For the clinical examination of the anesthetic form the suspect was
blindfolded. Then his skin was touched with a cotton swab, a feather,
a camel's hair brush, or a paper spill, and he was asked to indicate where
he had been touched. The head and the point of a pin were pressed
alternately against suspected spots, and the patient was asked which
caused the more pain. Test tubes, one filled with hot water and the
other with cold, were held against his skin, and he was asked to tell which
was warm and which was cold. Finally, a scraping was taken from the
septum of the nose with a blunt, narrow-bladed scalpel, and put under
the microscope.

The actual work of collecting the lepers and caring for them after
they were gathered together presented obstacles, many of which at times
seemed insurmountable. Most people have a spontaneous impulse to-
ward charity and a social conscience which impels them to do good,
but these emotions are often dissipated in the face of actuality, particularly
where the task is loathsome and repellent. When it came to transporting
lepers to a seaport, providing their subsistence, aiding them aboard the
steamer, making the necessary medical examinations, and attending to
their needs, experience again and again demonstrated that only those
of my doctors who were possessed of superior courage and capable of
supreme self-sacrifice could be induced to continue at the work.

Often lepers had been confined in a barbarous manner by the local
officials at the outskirts of towns. Once when we arrived in a province
we found them in an abandoned warehouse, where they had been shut
up for weeks pending our arrival. Some were literally rotting away. I
had several doctors with me, most of them long experienced in work
of this kind, but they became so nauseated by the foul stench from the
gangrenous, putrescent ulcers that they could hardly bring themselves
to handle the patients. One old woman in particular was no more than
a mass of decaying flesh, rotten as a corpse long exposed; she looked
as though she were going to fall to pieces. It was with the utmost difficulty
that I finally summoned the courage to gather her up and carry her on
board in a basket.

There was always, of course, the danger of infection. On one occasion
cholera broke out on the Basilan in the midst of a collection trip in the
Southern Islands. I ordered the boat to make for Culion as quickly as
possible, but at best it would take several days, and the quarters on board
were too small for effective isolation. After we arrived at Culion, I im»

612 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

mediately segregated the lepers in groups of ten, so that if one group
should become infected, it alone would have to be quarantined. One
leprous woman was not only violently insane, but also came down with
cholera. She would keep no clothing on and, since she was completely
uncontrollable, she was a deadly menace to everyone. It required a
physical struggle, but I finally succeeded in pinioning and imprisoning
her. In the process she scratched me so deeply in the arm that I still bear
the scar. It is extremely unpleasant to be scratched by an insane leper
with cholera, and I lost no time in drenching the wound with disinfectant,
though I could not be certain that it would prove effective. There is no
way to tell who have and who have not immunity to leprosy, but my
mind is now at rest, because the twenty years of possible incubation have
passed, and I have not yet evidenced any signs of leprosy.

In the light of our present knowledge I believe that isolation is the best
course in a country such as the Philippines, but it will take a long time
to prove that it can wipe out the disease, because many cases in the in-
cubation period cannot be detected. . . .

It must be said to the credit of the Filipinos that the effort to segregate
lepers was never seriously opposed. In the majority of cases they co-
operated, even though this often involved the lifelong separation of wife
from husband, sister from brother, child from parents, and friend from
friend. Only in comprehending this can it be realized what forbearance
was exercised by the Filipinos.

I can still hear ringing in my ears the cries of anguish of the relatives
and friends who used to follow us down to the boat drawn up on the
open beach. As we rowed out to the Basilan, and the Easilan steamed out
to the open sea, I could see them standing there, and hear faint echoes of
their grief. It was an experience to which I never became hardened. I
knew that even as the Easilan was hull down on the horizon they would
still be there, straining for a last glance at those whom they never ex-
pected to see again.

The Easilan had no sooner landed its first grim cargo at Culion than
I realized that my responsibilities toward the lepers whom I had up-
rooted from their homes had only begun. Transporting them there and
providing them with food and lodging was merely a prelude to the real
work.

After the novelty of their surroundings had ceased to attract and divert
the lepers, they often became homesick, and yearned for their old asso-
ciations. In every way we tried to make their life as nearly as possible
like that of their own villages, always remembering Culion was a town

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 613

of invalids. We put Tagalog with Tagalog, Ilocano with Ilocano, Visayan
with Visayan, Moro with Moro; they would mix during the day but
at night liked to be with their own kind.

Little by little we beautified the place with trees, palms, and shrubbery.
I designed a semi-open air theatre, with Chinese spirals and other roof
decorations, but the workmen were unable to follow my intention so
that when finished it resembled no known style of architecture. It served
its purpose, however. It was so constructed that those who needed pro-
tection could sit under the roof, and the rest in chairs around the outside.

Filipinos are born actors and the lepers took eagerly to dramatics. Be-
sides putting on plays of their own, they enjoyed greatly the films with
which generous motion picture companies kept me supplied.

Filipinos are natural musicians also. I have always believed it would
be possible to hand fifty band instruments at random to fifty Filipinos
and hear sweet music at once. The Filipinos have made music for the
entire East. I have heard the rhythm of their Spanish melodies echoing
from dance floors and theatres at Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, and every-
where else in the Orient.

The lepers were no exception. Culion took great pride in its band and
practised faithfully. This we encouraged, because the music cheered them
enormously. The lepers at San Lazaro at Manila had a particularly good
stringed orchestra which used to greet me on every visit. Once after a
long absence I was welcomed as warmly as ever but observed with sur-
prise that no music was on hand. "Why don't you play?" I asked.

"We can't."

"Why not?"

In dumb reply they held up their hands; they had literally played their
fingers off.

Our first collections of lepers were composed of those who were so ill
as to be nearly helpless. The disease had produced such contractions of
limbs, destruction of tissues, losses of fingers and toes, impairment of
muscular power, and general debility, that only a few could perform
the heavy work connected with agriculture, which we hoped would
divert them as well as contribute toward their support. Also, many had
fever several days during the month, and more were entirely bedfast.

It was not easy to keep the semi-well occupied and distracted. Because
of the public's great fear of infection, they could not weave hats of palm
or dresses of jusi cloth, carve knickknacks or hammer brass ash trays
for general sale. We did not even advocate the manufacture of these
handicrafts because the innate Filipino disposition to take life easy,
while deplorable for the healthy, is not at all a bad thing for lepers. They

614 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

did little work other than that entailed by their own domestic require-
ments.

At first we tried serving cooked food in a cafeteria, but when our
Occidental methods of preparation obviously did not please our patrons,
we gave them the raw food and let them prepare it to suit their own
tastes. Some years later Miss Hartley Embrey, an able food chemist, went
to Culion as a volunteer to devise ways of combining proper dietary with
Filipino gustatory preferences. The most advanced cases had been col-
lected earlier; the later comers were in the initial stages of the disease,
and consequently not so badly incapacitated. Basing his action on Miss
Embrey's advice, General Wood arranged for the employment of com-
petent gardeners. Ubi tubers were introduced from the Batanes and leafy
vegetables were grown with great success. They started tiny sugar planta-
tions, the output of which was purchased by the government and reissued
as food to the lepers.

Cattle raising was starred. We also encouraged them to fish, and they
paddled little balsas of lashed bamboo to the huged fenced fish traps and
to other waters. They did well at fishing, and daily we purchased large
quantities. In addition to buying their produce we gave them a gratuity of
twenty cents a week, and established a store at which small comforts were
sold. In order to avoid all risk of infection outside, special money was
used, which circulated only in the colony. . . .

The comparative contentment of the lepers was in great measure due
to the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres, who had dedicated their lives to
the care of these unfortunates. Outwardly calm and happy, the Sisters
spread an atmosphere of cheer around them that was truly magnificent.
Whenever the Basilan came into port, they would have to dress the
nauseating, disgusted wounds of the newcomers, and each day thereafter
throughout every year, this routine had to be repeated with never a
break. In emergencies they had to perform amateur surgical operations.

I had always had a notion that cleanliness was an important factor
in the prevention of leprosy. If those even in the closest contact kept
free of vermin and washed their hands and bodies frequently and thor-
oughly, I beliveved they would incur little danger. Although I could
not confirm this theory scientifically, I had noted that nurses and attend-
ants who worked at leper colonies and did not keep themselves clean
often did contract the disease.

I asked the Sisters to promise me solemnly that when they entered the
hospital from their quarters in the clean part of the colony, they would
removed their clothes in a room provided for that purpose before walking
into the next room, where disinfected clothing would be waiting. When

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 615

they left, they were to reverse the process, bathing themselves with dis-
infecting soap, stepping into the clean room, and there putting on their
own clothes. Some of these nurses have been at Culion almost thirty years
and not one has contracted leprosy. I have always ascribed this to the
faithful manner in which they have carried out my initial instructions.

Among the loyal band of nurses Sister Calixte Christen was outstand-
ing. As a young woman she had left Chartres and her family and friends
to devote her life to lepers, the most friendless of human beings. With
her own gaiety she lightened the burden of the hopeless. She had an
extraordinary facility for languages, which she cultivated so that she
might bring to each of the patients under her care added cheer. In June,
1926, General Wood and his staff attended the ceremony of presenting
her a gold medal, cast especially for the occasion and given in recognition
of her remarkable services over this long period of time. . . .

Each time I paid a visit to Culion there was usually a public reception,
complete with banners, a band, and an impressive parade. The duty of
presenting petitions weighs heavily upon all Filipinos, no matter how un-
important the subject matter may be. My coming offered an unexampled
opportunity to fulfill this obligation. Such petitions I was usually able
to handle with a fair degree of diplomacy, but once I found myself obliged
to retreat ingloriously from a mass attack of the women of Culion on
the question of segregation of the sexes.

We had provided separate sleeping quarters for men and women but
did not forbid them to mingle by day. Certain well-meaning persons who
had interested themselves in the lepers were horrified. They brought
pressure to bear on the government, and the Governor General issued
orders. One part of the Island was to be set aside for the women and sur-
rounded with a very high barbed wire fence. It was all finished and pre-
pared for occupation when I arrived on my next trip. But I found that
the sequestration had not been carried out in accordance with the decree.
"Why hasn't this been done?" I asked the doctor in charge.

"The women simply won't go," he replied. "Short of a couple of regi-
ments of constabulary we can't do anything with them. If you think you
can persuade them, you go ahead and try."

"Let's call a meeting," I suggested. I had often addressed them before
and anticipated no trouble. When the women were assembled, I climbed
up on a soap box and stood under the blazing hot noonday sun, looking
down on the bobbing mass of black umbrellas, tipped back to frame the
furious faces. I explained to them that separation was believed to be for
their own good, and that in any event the instructions of the Governor
General must be carried out.

616 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

The Filipino women are even better orators than the men. One of them
rose and delivered a fervent harangue to the effect that the rest of the
world, after having segregated them, had not before seemed to concern
itself with their welfare, and why should it take this unpleasant interest
in them now? The women of Culion had asked for no protection from
the men and did not want any.

Another rebel followed with an even more impassioned address. She
worked upon the audience, already aroused, until they began to shout,
"Kill him! Kill him!"

The umbrellas shut with a loud concerted swish, and with steel points
sparkling, they converged toward my midriff. As the rush began, there
flashed through my mind a picture of the ignominious fate which awaited
me — punctured to death by umbrellas.

I held up my hand and shouted at the top of my lungs. "Wait a min-
ute! Wait a minute!"

Fortunately one of the leaders heard me, and with a stentorian voice
repeated, "Wait a minute! Let him talk! Let's hear what he has to say."

The umbrellas were poised in mid-air, steel points still aimed at me.

"If you feel so strongly about this, I promise you will not be isolated
until I have had a talk with the Governor General! I give you my word
that no further attempts will be made to carry out the order until after
we have had this conference!"

Slowly the points were lowered, and the women disbanded. I was
saved. I went to the Governor General as I had promised. "It's no longer
the responsibility of the Director of Health to carry out such orders. I've
made every reasonable effort, and I'm not going to risk my life again."

He agreed that other means should be found to meet objections. The
women continued to live as they had done formerly, but ultimately homes
were established for the young girls. The Sisters took charge of them,
and saw that the doors were securely locked at night, although a rumor
was current that a Sabine raid had once been planned and executed.

We had discouraged marriage because we did not want the lepers
to contract lasting relationships which might entail suffering later if
one partner should be cured and dismissed from Culion. But when they
produced offspring without benefit of clergy, moral necessities obtruded
upon medical ones, and our religious advisers insisted they must marry.
Our concern before had been to prevent propagation, but now the birth
rate began to increase.

Leprosy is most easily contracted in childhood; the earliest age at which
it can be detected is about two, although generally it evinces its presence
at from three to four years. Possibly the contraction of the disease in in-

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 617

fancy is due to the close contact of leprous parents and children. Statistics
show that if babies are not removed from their mothers before they are
six months old, approximately half of them will become leprous.

That heredity plays little part in the transmission of leprosy has been
shown at Molokai, where the children of lepers are removed a few days
after birth to beautifully appointed homes in Honolulu, one for boys
and another for girls. There they are cared for until they reach the age
of twenty-one. During the thirty years this system has been in effect,
not one child, according to the report, has ever developed leprosy.

The problem of what should be done with the children born at Culion
offered great difficulties. No law existed, as in Hawaii, whereby we could
take them from their parents. The duty seemed to devolve upon me of
persuading the mothers of Culion to surrender their babies. I used to get
them together and harangue them for hours, appealing to their mother
love, and explaining how their children would almost certainly contract
leprosy unless they were put in a safe home outside the colony. After
having my pleas fall on deaf ears time after time, on one occasion my
persuasive powers must have become transcendental, because twenty-six
mothers, inspired with the spirit of self-denial, offered me their children.

. . . The plan ultimately adopted was to allow the babies to remain
with their mothers for six months, and then place them for two years in
a nursery situated outside the leper limits. Those who became afflicted
with the disease during that period were returned to their parents; those
who remained free of it could be sent, with their parents' approval, to
Welfareville near Manila. Only a small percentage of the children treated
in this manner became leprous.

When I went to the Philippines little was known, except in a general
way, about the treatment of leprosy. The prospects of cure were most dis-
couraging. Hundreds of remedies had been tried, but only failure had
followed. From time to time an isolated cure had been reported. This
could be ascribed to a number of reasons: the diagnosis might not have
been satisfactorily confirmed, the recovery might have been spontaneous,
or the reliability of the reports might have been in doubt. Experience
with thousands of lepers in the Islands taught me that occasionally in-
dividuals alternately recovered and relapsed, and during the period of
temporary recovery it was impossible to prove leprosy, even by micro-
scopical methods.

Many treatments for leprosy, like those for tuberculosis, seemed to cause
some improvement. Furthermore, under better hygienic conditions and
hospital care, or for other reasons not understood, the disease is often

618 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

arrested; in a few instances improvement results, so that occasionally
apparent cilres may take place without any treatment. . . .

Hot baths to elevate the temperature are a desirable part of all modern
treatments. The protein reaction and fever caused by vaccination was also
decidedly helpful. For a time we had high hopes from the use of X-rays,
applied as near the burning point as possible without actually inflicting
permanent injury. In two cases slightly burning the skin produced an
apparent cure, but the method was so severe that it could not be generally
used. . . .

It has long been known to the natives of India that chewing the leaves
and the twigs of the chaulmoogra tree has a beneficial effect on leprosy.
There was a pre-Buddhist legend, centuries old, that a leprous king of
Burma had entered the forest and cured himself by eating the raw seeds.
Eventually the Indians deduced that it was the oil of the chaulmoogra
tree, and this is found most abundantly in the nut, which contains the
curative substance.

In 1907, Dr. Isadore Dyer, Professor of Dermatology at Tulane Uni-
versity, brought the properties of chaulmoogra oil arrestingly to the at-
tention of the scientific world by reporting its successful use at the Louisi-
ana colony for leprosy in Iberville Parish. I visited there the following
year and gained a most favorable impression of the treatment.

As soon as I had returned to the Islands Dr. Dyer's treatment was given
a thorough trial. The drug had to be taken by mouth, and most patients
became so nauseated that only one out of three hundred could retain the
oil over a period long enough to be effective. The poor lepers would
say, "Doctor, I'd rather have leprosy than take another dose!"

Then began an extended series of experiments to develop some method
of administering the remedy without the resulting nausea. Chaulmoogra
capsules were coated with salol or other substances so that they would
pass through the stomach without digesting. Enemas were tried. Most
of all we wanted to inject chaulmoogra hypodermically, but the oil
would not absorb.

At this point a letter was written to Merck & Company, in Germany,
in which we asked whether they could suggest any substance to add to
the chaulmoogra oil which might cause it to absorb when injected hypo-
dermically. They replied that they had no practical knowledge, but
theoretically it was possible that the addition of camphor or ether might
give the desired result. The testing of this possibility was done by Elidoro
Mercado, the house physician at San Lazaro. He added camphor to
Unna's old oral prescription of resorcin and chaulmoogra oil. To our
great joy we found that this combination was readily absorbed.

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 619

Many came forward to volunteer for the new treatment. In fact, had
I announced to the lepers of Culion, "If your right arm is cut off, you will
be cured," dozens would have stepped forward.

The camphor-resorcin solution proved a great advance. After the first
year we were able to announce to the world that a number of cases had
become negative. We promised that if any patient remained so for two
years we would release him. When this actually happened, for the first
time in history hope was aroused that a permanent cure might be found
for this most hopeless disease.

Few can imagine with what a thrill we watched the first case to which
chaulmoogra was administered in hypodermic form, how we watched
for the first faint suspicion of eyebrows beginning to grow in again and
sensation returning to paralyzed areas. We took photographs at frequent
and regular intervals to compare progress and to check on our observa-
tions, fearing our imagination might be playing tricks upon us, because
in hundreds of years no remedy had been found which had more than
slight influence on this disease.

But I was not satisfied. The treatment was still so slow in bringing about
improvement or recovery that, after the first flush of excitement, the in-
terest of doctors, nurses, and patients all began to wane. To remedy this
and to discover more effective preparations of the oil, we brought over
chemists from America. They failed. As we went deeper into the subject
it became more and more clear that the world's knowledge of leprosy was
still very primitive. If further progress were to be made, the resources
of science should be coordinated.

In 1915 I visited Calcutta and there met Sir Leonard Rogers, who had
just succeeded in curing amoebic dysentery with the emetine treatment.
I endeavored to interest him in our research work, telling him we were
on the first rung of the ladder but, strive as we would to reach the next
one, we could not secure a footing.

Although Sir Leonard was interested he said, "I've been in India many
years now, and I feel I'm entitled to a rest. I'm just about to retire and
return to England." But he had made a mistake in having me as his guest.
I kept after him hammer and tongs until he agreed to postpone his re-
tirement and work on my problem. In only a few months, with the
assistance of an Indian chemist, he was able to make a chaulmoogra oil
preparation which halved the time of treatment.

I continued my efforts to enlist the services of as many scientists as pos-
sible. When I next passed through Hawaii, I called the attention of the
Molokai authorities to the progress in India, and suggested that they take

620 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

up the work in their laboratory from a new angle. The use of ethyl esters
allowed us to ascend at one bound several rungs of the ladder of prog-
ress. Many cases so treated recovered and only eight percent relapsed
after a year or so. ...

Success in treating leprosy has become as important a factor in pre-
venting its spread as segregation. It is obvious that if a child with an
infective lesion is promptly discovered and successfully treated a most
important focus of infection is eliminated. The course of leprosy is of
such great chronicity that final conclusions about the therapeutic value
of a drug or method cannot be arrived at until after it has been used for
several years. Both clinical estimates and microscopic examinations are
subject to many errors.

I sometimes compare the treatment of leprosy with an automobile
which has been going down hill with no brakes. Present day treatment
has provided brakes. These do not always stop the car, but they do slow
it down; sometimes they stop it completely, and occasionally it is pos-
sible to reverse the machine and put it back on the road to health.

Although of no case is it possible to state definitely that it can be
cured with the present chaulmoogra oil treatment as standardized at
Culion, ten percent of the patients recover, and fifty percent have a cos-
metic cure, that is, the outward lesions disappear and the disease makes
no further progress. In the case of thirty percent the disease is arrested,
and ten percent are entirely uninfluenced and keep on getting worse.
Among lepers who have not had the disease more than four or five years
and are not beyond the period of young adult life, in certain groups vary-
ing with the country, sometimes twenty-five percent can be paroled.
Such lepers are ordinarily examined at stated intervals for a reasonably
safe period.

The earlier a case of leprosy can be detected, the greater the likelihood
of recovery. In Zamboanga live two girls who were paroled in 1911 when
they were ten and twelve years old. I have been watching them since
their childhood. They are grown up and married, and have children of
their own. They bear a few scars which will never disappear, but they
are well, and show no signs of leprosy.

Several thousand lepers have now been freed from Culion after having
the treatment, but one of the great unsolved problems is what to do with
those who have recovered but who are badly disfigured. Many were deeply
conscious of the stigma attached to them when they returned to their
old homes. Often they begged to be allowed to stay at Culion, and a clean
section of the Island was set apart for them where they could earn their
living.

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES 621

Although chaulmoogra oil produces a certain measure of success, the
search continues constantly for more effective remedies. Mercurochrome,
bismuth, neo-salvarsan, X-ray, diathermy, anything that offers even the
remotest hope is tested out. Dr. Gordon Ryrie, an expert in dye thera-
peutics, became interested in leprosy and went to the Sungei Buloh Leper
Settlement, near Kuala Lumpur, in Malaya. He argued that since coal
tar dyes, which are used to stain bacilli, promptly kill them in the labora-
tory, why should not the same result be produced in the human body ?

After some experimentation Dr. Ryrie found that the blue dyes had
a definite therapeutic effect. First he tried methylene blue, and then
trypan blue. It was a most startling sight to see him work. Within a
minute and a half after the intravenous injection, the surface lesions of
leprosy became clearly outlined, just as though they had been painted
upon the skin. Even lesions not ordinarily visible to the eye became blue,
and gradually the whole body turned indigo. At the end of a week the
leprous nodules began to soften and to be absorbed. The blue color van-
ished about six weeks after the last injection. Sometimes in three months
all the external symptoms disappeared and the case became negative.
For a time it looked as though a real remedy had been found, but unfor-
tunately many of these cases shortly relapsed.

Fluorescin is being given intravenously, and acts as well as trypan
blue. Recently a California pharmacologist named C. D. Leake pro-
duced a synthetic preparation which he called chaul-phosphate. This
is now being tried out at the Brazil leprosarium at Rio de Janeiro, and
the lepers of Panama are being injected with it.

Too many disappointments in the past prevent us from becoming ex-
cited about a supposed new remedy until it has been completely tested.
So far none has proved more efficacious than chaulmoogra ethyl esters.
But meanwhile the quest goes on ....

For thousands of years any man, woman, or child on whom the blight
of leprosy had fallen, knew himself condemned to a living death. Even
thirty years ago no hope could be held out to these unfortunates, who
were not even permitted by an unkind Providence to die of their disease,
but must linger on for years of untold suffering and degradation.
Wherever I have gone over the face of the earth I have visited colonies
of lepers, and the change that has taken place is no less than miraculous,
Nothing in my life has given me so much joy as to see the light of hope
slowly kindled in faces once set in lines of despair. The lepers now feel
themselves on the threshold of deliverance. They are patient because of
the chance, however slight, that they may be once again restored to the
world of men and life.

622 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

"In his nipa hut, high on the hill of the Leper City, old Lazaro de
Paerusza sits in the little bamboo doorway staring seaward with eyes
that leprosy has long since blinded. He turns over and over in gnarled
patient fingers a battered pair of binoculars. One of the padres gave them
to him when his sight first began to fail to help his dimming eyes grope
seaward towards the ships — the little trudging coastwise ships that, once
in three weeks, in four, in six, come tacking through the reefs with help
for Culion. Each day he waits, listening, for the new ship that is to bring
America's mercy to those who live beyond the grave. 'No ship today,
matanda?' they ask him at the end of an empty day. He listens. He hears
the night. The reefs chant under the moon. The wild dogs howl in the
hills as they rummage among the shallow graves. He shakes his old head
and smiles, wisely and believingly as children smile, 'Daratlng. Darating
din Butys? he says in the vernacular — says it for all the patient, buried
thousands at Culion — 'tomorrow. Tomorrow it will come.' "

1936

War Medicine and War Surgery

GEORGE W. GRAY

From Science at War

NO TWO WARS HAVE EVER PRESENTED COMPLETELY
parallel circumstances. The development of the aircraft and tank
has introduced factors which are without precedent. The wide spread of
the present conflict, with battlefields in tropics and arctic — and in the
stratosphere — creates problems in biological as well as mechanical engi-
neering. Fortunately, the military doctor has powerful resources. Not only
the sulfonamides, but even more potent microbe-fighters are available.
There are toxoids against tetanus, vaccines against yellow fever and other
contagions, plasma for transfusions, and surgical units so compact that
they can be transported to the front line when necessary. Ambulance
planes get a wounded man from the battlefield to the operating table,
often in a matter of minutes, where the motor ambulances of 1918 re-
quired hours and sometimes days.

SOME RECORDS FROM THE SURGICAL FRONT

Wounds of the abdomen have usually killed. In past wars more than
half of the men wounded in this way, and on whom the surgeons were
able to operate, died. In the present war, practically all published reports
show a recovery rate better than 50 per cent. Thus, a medical officer of
the British Navy, reporting to the Royal College of Surgeons the results
of abdominal operations on 600 wounded men rescued from Dunkirk
and other early British engagements and air raids, stated that "the per-
centage of recoveries for injuries to stomach, small intestine, rectum, and
spleen was actually higher than that in 1914-1918, and for large bowel
injuries it was the same as it was then." In stomach wounds the recovery
rate was 60 per cent, to compare with less than 37 per cent in 1914-1918.

Two years and more after Dunkirk came the battles in the Solomon
Islands, and the records of the U. S. Army there show a recovery rate

623

624 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

of 95 per cent from abdominal wounds. When all hospitalized cases,
including every kind of wound, are in the reckoning, the percentage of
fatalities following treatment falls to an even lower figure — 1.5 per cent
for the wounded of Guadalcanal.

One U. S. Navy hospital ship operating in combat zones during 1942
had only 7 deaths among 4,000 wounded men — 0.18 per cent. These
wounded were gathered from several months of fighting in the Pacific
area, and included practically every type of battle injury: wounds from
machine guns, rifles, shell fragments, and bomb-bursts, severe burns and
bone fractures, head wounds, chest wounds, belly wounds, arm and leg
injuries, and a smattering of the unusual, such as injuries from immersion
blast and shark bites. The surgeons reporting the experience remarked
on the unusual number of multiple injury cases — in which fractured
bones, burns, and metal fragments were found all in one patient. Of
course, these 4,000 were those who survived the first-aid and other early
treatment on fighting ships or battlefield stations, and therefore represent
a certain selection, but even so the death rate of 0.18 is perhaps an all-time
low for so large and representative a series of war wounded. The results
confirm the record made by the medical men at Pearl Harbor, and
suggest that their high percentage of success was no mere stroke of
chance.

PREPAREDNESS AT PEARL HARBOR

. . . It is a striking coincidence that on the Friday evening preceding the
Sunday morning of the attack, some 300 medical men of Hawaii, includ-
ing most of the army and navy surgeons stationed at Pearl Harbor,
gathered to hear a lecture on "Treatment of Wounds, Civil and Military"
by Dr. John J. Moorhead of New York. This distinguished professor of
surgery in the New York Postgraduate Medical School has had a wide
experience with wounds of violence, both as an army medical officer in
the First World War and as chief surgeon of the New York subway
system, and he had arrived in Hawaii just two days before, in
response to an invitation from the Honolulu Medical Society to give a
series of ten lectures. On that Friday night Dr. Moorhead reviewed the
principles and procedures of modern traumatic surgery. He emphasized
the preliminary necessity of cleansing the wound thoroughly with soap
and water, the importance of drastic debridement or cutting away of all
crushed and dead tissue, the remarkable outwitting of certain bacteria
to be obtained by packing the wound with crystals of sulfanilamide or
sulfathiazole, the value of leaving the wound wide open for the first
three days, meanwhile dosing the patient at four-hour intervals with a

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 625

sulfonamide drug to guard against infection and with a sedative to
suppress pain. There were questions and answers. Many of the minutiae
of operational technique and post-operative treatment of victims of gun-
shot, explosive bombs, incendiaries, and other instruments of violence
were rehearsed by the professor, little dreaming that within thirty-six
hours he and his audience would be called upon to put these methods to a
large-scale test. Sunday morning he was beginning a lecture on "Burns"
when the summons came from the army, and thereafter Moorhead spent
a stretch of eleven hours in the operating room. As though to say, "Here,
you have been telling us how to do this thing, now — ," the surgeons in
one big army hospital by common consent placed the New York professor
in charge. Four extra operating rooms were hastily improvised and put
into commission in addition to the regular three, and at times there were
as many as twelve surgical teams operating simultaneously. Similar scenes
were being enacted at other hospitals of Honolulu and vicinity.

"The results were better than I had ever seen during nineteen months
in France in 1917-1918," said Dr. Moorhead when he returned to New
York a month later. "The death rate following operations was only 3.8
per cent; no deaths at all resulted from gas gangrene; purulent discharge
was almost absent. I attribute the results to five main factors: first, early
receipt of the wounded, within the 'golden period' of six hours; second,
preliminary shock treatment by transfusion with whole blood, plasma,
or other fluids; third, adequate debridement with no primary suturing;
fourth, use of sulfonamide drugs in the wound and by the mouth; fifth,
adequate after care." The fact that most of the victims were not wearing
puttees saved them from the contamination of dirty fabrics driven into
the wound. It was also fortunate from this point of view that the attack
came early Sunday morning, when the men were clean and not war-
worn. The mild climate was favorable, and the fact that there were few
flies seemed important to the surgeon.

One detail of this story focusses on a little black box which Dr. Moor-
head brought from his New York surgery. In outer appearance, it resem-
bled a portable radio set. Within the box were vacuum-tube amplifiers
and a recording dial; but instead of picking up radio waves, this set was
able to pick up electromagnetic variations caused by the presence of
metal. There was a wand-like rod attached to the apparatus through a
flexible wire. By slowly passing this rod over the surface of the body, or
into a wound, it could be made to serve as an antenna to detect the
presence and position of hidden bullets, imbedded fragments of shell,
splinters of steel, and the like — working on the same principle as the
"outdoor carpet sweepers" used in North Africa to spot the presence of

626 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

buried ground mines. The locator had been developed at the surgeon's
suggestion by Sam Herman, an electrical engineer of the New York
transit system, and had already been used in civilian practice. Dr. Moor-
head intended to demonstrate it in one of his lectures, but the apparatus
got its first Hawaiian demonstration in critical emergency use that
Sunday afternoon when it revealed a machine gun bullet lodged in the
spinal canal of a severely stricken soldier. "Despite the use of X-rays, I
would have failed had it not been for the aid afforded by the locator,"
said Moorhead. Other surgeons too used this instrument. Twenty-one
imbedded metal fragments were removed from wounds without a single
failure. The locator was left in Honolulu and continues in service there.
Meanwhile, a number of sets have been produced for the army and navy.
The performance of this sensitive wand of electromagnetism is part of
the medical saga of Pearl Harbor. . . .

THE COMMITTEE ON MEDICAL RESEARCH

Many of today's medical advances can be traced to beginnings in 1914-
1918. The casualties pouring back from the Marne, the Somme, Verdun,
the Meuse-Argonne, and other battlefields converted France into a vast
pathological laboratory. For the first time trained physiologists were able
to make large-scale studies of traumatic shock in human bodies, and out
of these studies came recognition of the imperative importance of blood
transfusion for the wounded. Overworked but daring doctors, confronted
with thousands of head injuries, developed the modern techniques of
brain surgery. Dr. Winnett Orr introduced his plaster cast system of
immobilizing wounds back in 1917 as a young medical officer of the
AJE.F., though it was not until the Spanish Civil War that the method
won public attention. X-ray apparatus was ponderous and photograph-
ically slow, but it demonstrated its usefulness. Though there were units
called mobile in 1918, they were elephantine compared with the compact
X-ray installations which now travel by airplane. Today also there are
new anesthetics to facilitate field surgery: pentothal, administered swiftly
to the blood stream by hypodermic needle, has won high praise. An early
report from the New Guinea battlefield rated blood plasma, sulfanila-
mide, and pentothal as "the three most important agencies for the treat-
ment of battle wounds that science has discovered since the last war."
Pentothal is of the same chemical family as veronal, the familiar sleeping
compound whose formula was discovered a few years before the First
World War. And sulfanilamide was actually on the chemists' shelves all
during 1914-1918. It was first synthesized in 1908, and immediately proved

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 627

useful in the manufacture of dyes, but not until the 1930*5 were its germ-
fighting properties recognized and demonstrated.

Science is exploring many strange trails in the quest for new drugs,
immunizing agents, healing remedies, and for new uses of the old ones.
Work of this kind has been going on for years. It is carried on inde-
pendently in universities, medical schools, hospitals, pharmaceutical
laboratories, and other research centers. But today, in place of the scat-
tered efforts of individual investigators, we have in the United States a
closely coordinated program under the national Committee on Medical
Research. During 1942 a total of $3,430,480 was allocated by this commit-
tee in contracts with various universities, drug manufacturers, and other
institutions for research on particular problems in medicine. By 1943,
more than 300 laboratory investigations in 85 institutions were under
way. The committee, which is headed by Dr. A. N. Richards of the
University of Pennsylvania Medical School, is a department of the all-
inclusive Office of Scientific Research and Development. While other
agencies of OSRD are exploring physics, chemistry, and related specialties
for improvements in weapons to use against hostile man, this Committee
on Medical Research is prospecting biophysics, biochemistry, pharma-
cology, physiology, pathology, psychiatry, and various biological fields in
the search for weapons against disease and death.

To illustrate the sort of work sponsored by the committee, three
research undertakings which have received its support will be reviewed.
One, having to do with the separation of blood plasma into fractions for
transfusion and other uses, is already in production; its products have
been moving to the battlefronts since 1942. Another, concerned with the
extraction of a fungus product which has amazing power to neutralize
bacteria, is just emerging from the stage of testing and pioneering into
full-scale clinical use. The third, a search for more effective drugs against
malaria, is still in the exploratory stage.

BLOOD PLASMA

During the First World War tens of thousands of lives were saved
by injecting the blood from a donor into a severely wounded man wh»se
blood was of compatible type. In the years following the war it was
realized that whole blood was not necessary for many of these transfu-
sions. What the wounded man needed was a liquid which would restore
volume to his circulation, provide sufficient fluid for the heart to pump
on; and it was found that the plasma, or straw-colored liquid which
remains after the red cells and leucocytes have been removed, was admi-
rably suited for these transfusions. Moreover, with a plasma transfusion

628 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

the blood did not have to be typed. The main differences which distin-
guish the blood types from one another are in the cells, and plasma
transfusions were therefore more convenient and time-saving. Then, a
few years ago, it was demonstrated that plasma could be evaporated to
a brownish powdery residue, that this dry plasma would keep indefinitely,
and when dissolved in sterile distilled water was ready and safe for use
in transfusion.

The first dry plasma was obtained by direct evaporation of liquid
plasma, but the results were not uniformly successful, and in 1935-1936
a different method was introduced. In this process the liquid part of
blood is first frozen and then subjected to the suction of a vacuum. The
frozen mass is kept at a temperature of about 4° below zero Fahrenheit,
while the suction of the vacuum leads through a closed tube which is
kept at around 94° below zero. The effect of the temperature difference
is to cause the water to "boil" out of the frozen mass. Its temperature of
minus 4° is so much better than the minus 94° that there is a thou-
sand-fold difference in vapor-pressure between the two regions, and in
consequence water particles literally fly from the frozen mass to the colder
region of lower pressure where they condense into ice. The effect is to dry
the plasma to a spongy mass of powder which instantly redissolves when
water is added to prepare it for a transfusion. The quick freezing has no
ill effect on the biological properties of the substance, and practically all
plasma for the Red Cross is now dried by this process.

As World War II began its carnage, the three degrees of blood material
— whole blood, liquid plasma, and dry plasma — were available. It was not
long, however, before dry plasma became almost standard for wartime
surgical use. Neat little containers were devised to hold a can of the
brownish powder, a bottle of distilled water, and a coil of tubing — and
these units by the thousands were shipped by the American Red Cross for
use in Britain and France and stored in convenient centers as reserves for
our army and navy.

Interest in plasma took a sudden rise in the spring of 1940 with the
German invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France. Authorities of the
Red Cross and the National Research Council foresaw an accelerated
demand from Europe, perhaps a call for 300,000 transfusion units. Although
this is a relatively small amount compared with the present rate of Red
Cross collections, it was far beyond the dimensions of any blood-donor
program which had been proposed up to that time. In the face of this
emergency, medical men thought of the possibility of using the plasma
of animal blood.

An important center of study in this field is the laboratory of physical

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 629

chemistry at the Harvard Medical School, where for twenty years Dr.
Edwin J. Cohn and a group have been exploring the proteins of blood.
So medical representatives of the Red Cross and the National Research
Council went to Dr. Cohn with this extremely difficult but important
task. They asked that he find out if it would be safe and beneficial to put
the plasma of a cow or horse into the veins of a man.

Cohn and his group took over this job in the summer of 1940, and they
are still at work on it, with a considerable harvest of experimental results.
But the most profitable outcome of their study is not the answer to the
question whether or not the plasma of animals can supply a useful sub-
stitute for blood in transfusions. That problem is still in the testing stage,
and tests with thousands of human subjects must be completed, and the
compatability of the animal material with the human system must be
thoroughly established before it can be accepted for clinical use. A more
immediate practical result of the Harvard research is the new knowledge
that has been gained of human plasma through the application to it of
the processes developed in the study of animal blood. As Dr. Walter B.
Cannon remarked, after reviewing the progress of the investigation, "it
may well be that the by-products of this study will turn out to be of more
value to medicine and surgery than the success of the original quest."

First among these by-products is the technique for separating plasma
into its constituents. Indeed, this separation was fundamental to the
basic problem. For plasma is not one substance but a mixture, and Dr.
Cohn recognized that before he could make any controlled tests of animal
plasma he would have to sort it out into its components and test each
fraction separately. Blood carries in solution all the products which the
living body releases into its circulation, and most significant among the
plasma constituents are its proteins. These are what give character and
individuality to plasma. Their molecules are huge structures of thousands
of atoms, but most can be classified under four headings: the albumins,
the antibodies, the clotting factors, and a heterogeneous group whose
members are less known. The Harvard chemists found a method of
precipitating the groups out one by one. They applied this method to the
plasma of human blood, and thus obtained concentrates of human albu-
min, concentrates of human antibodies, concentrates of human clotting
factors, each of which appears to be of value in medicine.

The albumins, for example, which in the course of the process are
separated from the mixture as a white crystalline powder, constitute 60
per cent of the total plasma proteins. Tests show that they are responsible
for 80 per cent of the osmotic effect of blood. This osmotic effect is the
property which causes circulating blood to draw water out of cells and

630 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

tissues, a highly important function in time of wound shock when the
fluid content of |£e circulation leaks out of the capillary walls and a
quick restoration of volume is necessary. Because of this superior water-
gaining property, transfusions made with concentrates of albumin have
proved to be very effective in the treatment of shock. A given quantity of
albumin will pull more water into the circulation than an equal quantity
of total plasma proteins. Moreover, a transfusion unit of albumin con-
centrate is more compact than a unit of whole plasma. It is sufficiently
stable to be bottled as a 25 per cent solution, it weighs less than a unit
of whole plasma, and nine times as many albumin units can be carried
in the same space in a plane or ship. . . .

Meanwhile the Harvard chemists were exploring other separated com-
ponents of plasma. The antibodies proved to be highly interesting. These
are the protective agents which the body builds and releases into the
circulation when it is invaded by an infection. In a large blood bank,
such as that accumulated by the American Red Cross, the blood of each
donor contributes certain antibodies. One person may have had measles
and mumps, another typhoid, another typhus or spotted fever; and so
with other infections — the blood bank contains among its mixture the
antibodies resulting from these numerous experiences with microbes.
The Harvard chemists found a way to concentrate the proteins containing
the antibodies. They then went on to select from this mass the antibodies
of virus diseases — with the result that little ampoules of the concentrates
were prepared for test use, to see if injections with them would protect
against the viruses. Very favorable results have been obtained from the
concentrated antibodies of measles. They are effective both in prevention
and modification of this contagious disease, and in the summer of 1943
plans were under way to concentrate measles antibodies from parts of the
blood collected by the Red Cross.

There are many other antibodies, most of them found in concentrations
too small to be of practical use in medicine. However, a closely related
fraction of the plasma contains the factors which agglutinize non-
compatible red blood cells, and these have been concentrated and pre-
pared for convenient use in typing the blood of a patient when his need
calls for a transfusion of whole blood.

Still another group of plasma components which have been separated
in highly concentrated form are the clotting factors, prothrombin and
fibrinogen. By certain well-known treatments the prothrombin is con-
verted to thrombin, which appears on precipitation as another white
powder. The fibrinogen also is like fine snow. When solutions of these
substances come together they react to form a clot, and the Harvard

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 651

investigators have found it possible to make clots with widely varying
properties from solutions of thrombin and fibrinogen. The clots can be
produced as membranes, filaments, jointures, or plugs. Plastic tubes and
discs of fibrinogen have also been prepared. In which state these products
of human blood may prove to be of most value remains to be determined
by surgical research. The use of the clotting factors in the treatment of
hemorrhage and burns is being investigated. . . .

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL

Blood is of the animal kingdom. Bacteria, which poison blood and
destroy cells and tissues, are of the vegetable kingdom. And sulfanilamide
is a coal-tar derivative of the mineral kingdom. Until very recently man's
most powerful known ally against the virulent little parasitic plants was
this mineral compound of sulfur. It has been made into tablets for dosing
by the mouth, into a solution for injection into the circulation, into a
powder for dusting on wounds, and more recently various sprays con-
taining sulfanilamide, and ointments, films, and other plastic membranes
compounded of sulfanilamide mixed with soothing oils and analgesics
have been fabricated as a dressing for wounds and burns. Reports of the
value of these treatments have come from many battlef ronts, base hospitals,
and casualty stations, as they have been coming too from civilian hospitals.
Destructive infections have been cleared up, periods of illness and wound
healing have been mercifully reduced, lives have been saved. Undoubtedly
the discovery of the bacteriastatic properties of this synthetic chemical
is one of the great achievements of modern medicine.

And yet, sulfanilamide is not an infallible remedy. There have been
tragic disappointments. There are some serious germ infestations against
which it seems to be powerless, or nearly so.

For example, a massive invasion of the blood stream by staphylococci,
called staphylococcal septicemia, suffers only a moderate setback from
even the most massive dosing with sulfonamide drugs. Before sulfanil-
amide came into use the death rate from this blood poisoning was 85 to
90 per cent; under sulfonamide treatment it has been reduced to an average
of 65 to 70 per cent, but that is still cruelly high. There is also a rare type
of pneumonia caused by staphylococcal infection of the lungs against
which the sulfa drugs are only feeble protection, though they are usually
victorious in combating the pneumococci and streptococci of ordinary
pneumonia.

Gas gangrene bacilli yield grudgingly to sulfanilamide and only in a
limited degree: a severe infection, even though heavily treated, is often
fatal. Staphylococcal infection of burns is also a stubborn problem, for the

632 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

microbes multiply with overwhelming rapidity among the dead and dying
cells of the seared flesh, and they seem to be able to develop a tolerance for
the drug. After the first day or two sulfanilamide doesn't seem to have
much effect. The British have produced a new drug, proflavin, for which
many special advantages are reported. It is said to be more potent than
the sulfonamides against the staphylococci. But since proflavin is toxic
in the blood stream, and therefore can be used only on the outside of
wounds, some surgeons won't risk it. A more recent British introduction
is propamidine, another synthetic compound which also is applied only
externally.

If that were all that could be said of the present medical front against
sulfonamide-resistant bacteria, there wouldn't be much point to bringing
up the subject. But there are exciting new developments, powerful rein-
forcements already on the scene, and this time the defense comes, not
from the mineral kingdom, but from the vegetable.

PENICILLIN

There is a tiny fungus, a greenish blue scum similar in appearance
to common bread mold. This fungus produces a substance, a fragile,
unknown chemical compound, which is by far the most potent known
agent against bacteria. Tests show that a dilution of i part in 100 million
is sufficient to prevent the growth of the highly infectious blood-destroying
Staphylococcus aureus. The mold is known botanically as Penicillium
notatum, and its mysterious germ-fighting extract has accordingly been
named penicillin.

A recent case in a New England hospital will illustrate its power. The
wife of a university official lay at the point of death, her blood the prey
of a spreading infection of Staphylococcus aureus. Sulfonamide com-
pounds had been used from the first appearance of symptoms, but with
little effect; the invasion was racing through her system and would be fatal
when the multiplication of bacteria reached the critical stage. The attend-
ing physician had heard of penicillin. Though not yet on the market it
had been produced in a few laboratories for experimental and clinical test-
ing, and as a last resort the doctor appealed for a dosage for his dying
patient. The penicillin was rushed to him by airplane, injected into the
poisoned blood stream, and thereafter the golden germs simply fell away
as though mowed down by an invisible reaper. It seemed miraculous, but
there are scores of equally moving rescues in the case histories of penicillin.

The discovery of this remarkable weapon against disease dates back to
1929. It was purely accidental. Dr. Alexander Fleming, in St. Mary's
Hospital, London, was growing colonies of bacteria on glass plates for

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 633

certain bacteriological researches. One morning he noticed that a spot of
mold had germinated on one of the plates. Such contaminations are not
unusual, but for some reason, instead of discarding the impurity and start-
ing fresh, Dr. Fleming decided to allow it to remain. He continued to
culture the plate, and soon an interesting drama unfolded beneath his
eyes. The area occupied by the bacteria was decreasing, that occupied by
the mold was increasing, and presently the bacteria had vanished.

Dr. Fleming now took up this fungus for study on its own account.
He recognized it as of the penicillium genus, and by deliberately intro-
ducing a particle into culture mediums where bacteria were growing, he
found that quite a number of species wouldn't grow in its presence. There
were other species which did not seem to be bothered. As he pursued his
experiments the scientist noticed that the bacteria which were able to live
with the penicillium were of the group known as gram-negative, so called
because they give a negative reaction to a certain staining test, named after
its inventor, the gram-test. Those which were unable to endure the mold
and died in its presence were gram-positive bacteria. In his laboratory,
whenever he wanted to get rid of a growth of gram-positive bacteria,
Fleming would implant a little penicillium, and after that the microbes
disappeared.

There are beneficial bacteria among the gram-positive group, but it also
includes some of the most predatory microbes known to human pathology.
For example, the causative agents of such horrible afflictions as septicemia,
osteomyelitis, gas gangrene, tetanus, anthrax, and plague are gram-posi-
tive. The streptococci, staphylococci, and pneumococci are all of this
grouping. So the medical scientists began to speculate. Since the mold
destroyed gram-positive organisms on a culture plate, could it be used
to destroy gram-positive disease germs in the living body?

This question was the starting point of a medical research which has
multiplied into many studies both in Great Britain and the United States^
Fundamental to the whole program was the separation and concentration
of the active substance, an achievement which was first accomplished by
British investigators. The British also were first to report the treatment
of human disease with penicillin. A team of biochemists and bacteriolo-
gists at Oxford has been especially active, and has reported many cures.
In the United States, studies have been made at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons in New York, the Mayo Clinic, the National Institute of
Health, the Evans Memorial Hospital of Boston, and practically all the
large pharmaceutical houses. Since 1941 the development of penicillin in
quantities sufficient for clinical use has been a major interest of the Com-
mittee on Medical Research, and its support of the work in several centers

034 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

has undoubtedly had much to do with the progress recently made. At
the same time, independent groups have contributed important findings
which are part of our advance.

Recent clinical tests leave no doubt of the medical and surgical value
of penicillin. It has cured acute cases of blood infection, bone infection,
eye infection, has conquered severe infestations of gonorrhea, has cleared
bacteria from massive burns and other wounds — and has done these jobs
often after the sulfonamides had failed, and with no adverse reactions in
the patient. A surgeon has reported, for example, that whereas the death
rate of staphylococcal blood poisoning before sulfanilamide was 85 to 90
per cent, and since sulfanilamide 65 to 70 per cent, "even our limited use of
penicillin has brought it down to 36 per cent." And, he added, "with
further knowledge of this new material, we think it can be reduced to
20 per cent." Practically every complication of staphylococcal infection
except one seems to yield. Endocarditis, a bacterial infestation of the
delicate lining of the heart, is resistant even to penicillin.

The principal factor limiting the use of the new germ-fighter has been
production. Enormous quantities of the mold have to be grown to obtain
even meager supplies. Also, the product is somewhat unstable, sensitive
to changes in temperature, therefore has to be kept under refrigeration.
Until we know its chemical formula and are able to synthesize it, we are
wholly dependent on the fungus to produce penicillin by natural vegeta-
tive processes. . . .

AGAINST MALARIA

Many bacterial infections have recently been out on the defensive, as
the story of penicillin and the sulfonamides suggests, but unfortunately
the world's most prevalent epidemic disease is not of this class. The agent
of malaria is not a bacterium at all, but a little animal, Plasmodium
malariae. For some reason the little animals seem to be tougher parasites
than the bacteria. Quinine has been in commercial production for over a
century, and tons of it have been consumed. About a dozen years ago
two synthetic chemicals, atabrin and plasmochin, also came into use as
anti-malarial drugs. But none of the three is a real remedy. "Not one will
cure with certainty," said Dr. Paul F. Russell of the U. S. Army Medical
Corps. "Not one is a true prophylactic drug, and not one is of much value
in the control of community malaria. . . ."

Quinine, atabrin, and plasmochin are helpful allies in the present stage
of our therapy, for until a better drug is found or fabricated they remain
our most important aids in the treatment of malaria. Quinine can interrupt

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 635

the acute attack, and, as Dr. L. W. Hackett has said, "that alone, for the
lives and suffering it has saved, will always entitle it to a medal of honor."
Indeed, quinine became more precious than gold after the Japanese
shut of? imports from the sources of supply in the Far East, and for a
while such reserves as could be accumulated were hoarded in U. S.
Treasury vaults. For general use in malaria treatment many physicians
regard quinine more highly than either atabrin or plasmochin. These
synthetic compounds have unfavorable after effects on many patients,
and it is generally recognized that they will have to be improved before
they can be accepted as complete substitutes for the natural product. In
fact, plasmochin is used only in combination with quinine, for alone it is
not sufficient.

Meanwhile, the shortage of quinine, the fact that quinine is only about
50 per cent effective against malaria, and the importance which malaria
occupies as Disease Hazard No. i in the war zones, constitute an emer-
gency combination of first rank. Shortly after the war began the search
for new and better anti-malarial drugs assumed a special interest in
several laboratories. With the organization of the Committee on Medical
Research in 1941, the search became another of its major interests, and
funds were provided to support the work on a wide front.

Several important leads have been opened up by these studies. Two
promising substances were found by Dr. Lyndon F. Small at the National
Institute of Health, and are being further explored. Dr. Small, an authority
on the chemistry of the alkaloids, the family of which quinine is a mem-
ber, has outlined a whole group of possible compounds for investigation.
Under the leadership of a committee of the National Research Council
twenty laboratories have been enlisted to pursue these and other possi-
bilities. Several large chemical manufacturing companies opened their
shelves of new, rare, and unexploited compounds, and permitted repre-
sentatives of the Committee on Medical Research to prospect these stocks
for possible useful drugs. Thousands of substances have been tested, and
thousands more will be.

An army that possessed a specific against malaria would have a stra-
tegic advantage, particularly in operations in Africa, Italy, the Balkans,
southern Russia, Asia, the South Pacific. In these areas malaria lurks as an
ever-present menace, "no longer an exotic disease, but a difficult military
problem." In the Philippines, at the fall of Bataan, 85 per cent of the
defending troops were ill of acute malaria. Early in 1943 it was reported
that more than half of the American troops stationed in some of the
islands of the southwest Pacific had contracted malaria. . . .

636 THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE

DYSENTERY AND BACTERIOPHAGE

In some battle areas bacillary dysentery is a close second to malaria.
The disease is an acute diarrhea caused by a bacterial infection of the
digestive tract, and like typhoid fever is most prevalent in regions of
primitive sanitation. Back in 1940 when sulfaguanidine, a new deriva-
tive of sulfanilamide, was found to be poorly absorbed from the digestive
tract, medical men hailed it as of possible use against this infection. The
fact that it was poorly absorbed suggested that it would stay in the tract
and perhaps inhibit the bacilli. Its use for this purpose has been successful
in many cases, but of only minor value in others, for apparently certain
virulent strains learn to accustom themselves to the chemical and finally
resist it. More recently two new derivatives of sulfathiazole have won
some success against the dysentery bacillus.

Interesting reports of the current use of bacteriophage have come from
a few European sources. This curious germ-killing substance is a natural
product found in bacteria-infested sewage, and acts as a virus which preys
on the disease germs themselves. In Alexandria, Egypt, bacteriophage has
been used to combat bacillary dysentery since 1928; and an English medi-
cal officer of the municipal laboratory there reports to the British Medical
Journal that under this treatment the dysentery death rate dropped from
above 20 per cent to less than 7 per cent. This officer also states that the
British, in capturing supplies left by Rommers fleeing Afrika Korps,
found bottles of dysentery bacteriophage prepared by the Germans for
use by their medical corps. Several papers published in German medical
journals of 1940 and 1941 report the use of bacteriophage against dysen-
tery, both in occupied Poland and in occupied France. Some of these
accounts claim that preliminary dosing with the phage had a prophylactic
effect, protecting the soldiers against infection.

Work on dysentery bacteriophage has been carried on in a few research
centers in the United States. Recently the Overly Biochemical Founda-
tion in New York succeeded in reducing the usually liquid preparation to
a dried stable powder. Several medical groups are now working with this
dried bacteriophage, testing it for use on human cases of the disease. . . .

. . . Psychiatry has criteria by which it is possible to identify a large
percentage of the emotional misfits and potential psychotics in advance,
and at least screen them into forms of service where the risk of mental
collapse is not at its maximum. It has been stated publicly by psychiatrists
that the army and navy are not making full use of these resources. Warn-
ings are already coming from medical men, preparing the home front for

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY 637

the mental cripples who are also part of the havoc of war. Pearl Harbor
had its casualties for whom there was no help in sulfanilamide or blood
plasma; men whose minds toppled under the shock of that awful
experience.

The vitamins, not a one of which was available in pure form in 1914-
1918, now share medical importance with drugs and vaccines, since science
has traced certain nervous, mental, and other functional disorders to a
deficiency of one or more of these food factors. Diets are prescribed
according to the service to be expected of the individual, and men assigned
to special duties requiring high endurance and closely coordinated per-
formance receive concentrates of fortifying food factors. The new methods
of processing foods, by dehydration, concentration, and other techniques,
have their medical as well as their industrial and economic aspects.

The remoteness of battlefields from the home base has increased the
problems of the medical crops; for the unaccustomed climates and other
environmental changes to which the soldier is subjected by war have
their repercussions in his biology.

Consider, for example, the physiological problems imposed by the
tank — problems of living for hours in the cramped space, problems of
enduring desert heat or arctic cold according to the latitude of the battle-
field, problems of gas fumes projected by explosives and motors, problems
of lighting, of seeing, hearing, and keeping a cool head and a steady hand
in the midst of the din of fighting. Tank designs, constructional details,
and interior arrangements and fittings have been considerably revised in
the course of the war as a result of searching laboratory studies of the
human body under experimental tank conditions ranging from those of
a Sahara sandstorm with temperatures up to 150° Fahrenheit to those of
an Alaskan winter with temperatures 70° below zero.

*943

D. MAN'S MIND

Thinking

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

From The Mind in the Making

ON VARIOUS KINDS OF THINKING

HE TRUEST AND MOST PROFOUND OBSERVATIONS ON

Intelligence have in the past been made by the poets and, in recent
times, by story-writers. They have been keen observers and recorders and
reckoned freely with the emotions and sentiments. Most philosophers,
on the other hand, have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and
have built up systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated
to actual human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the
actual process of thought and have set the mind off as something apart
to be studied by itself. But no such mind, exempt from bodily processes,
animal impulses, savage traditions, infantile impressions, conventional
reactions, and traditional \nowledge, ever existed, even in the case of the
most abstract of metaphysicians. Kant entitled his great work A Critique
of Pure Reason. But to the modern student of mind pure reason seems as
mythical as the pure gold, transparent as glass, with which the celestial
city is paved.

Formerly philosophers thought of mind as having to do exclusively
with conscious thought. It was that within man which perceived, remem-
bered, judged, reasoned, understood, believed, willed. But of late it has
been shown that we are unaware of a great part of what we perceive,
remember, will, and infer; and that a great part of the thinking of which
we are aware is determined by that of which we are not conscious. It has
indeed been demonstrated that our unconscious psychic life far outruns
our conscious. This seems perfectly natural to anyone who considers the
following facts:

The sharp distinction between the mind and the body is, as we shall

638

THINKING 639

find, a very ancient and spontaneous uncritical savage prepossession.
What we think of as "mind" is so intimately associated with what we
call "body" that we are coming to realize that the one cannot be under-
stood without the other. Every thought reverberates through the body,
and, on the other hand, alterations in our physical condition affect our
whole attitude of mind. The insufficient elimination of the foul and
decaying products of digestion may plunge us into deep melancholy,
where as a few whiffs of nitrous monoxide may exalt us to the seventh
heaven of supernal knowledge and godlike complacency. And vice versa,
a sudden word or thought may cause our heart to jump, check our
breathing, or make our knees as water. There is a whole new literature
growing up which studies the effects of our bodily secretions and our
muscular tensions and their relation to our emotions and our thinking.

Then there are hidden impulses and desires and secret longings of
which we can only with the greatest difficulty take account. They influence
our conscious thought in the most bewildering fashion. Many of these
unconscious influences appear to originate in our very early years. The
older philosophers seem to have forgotten that even they were infants
and children at their most impressionable age and never could by any
possibility get over it.

The term "unconscious," now so familiar to all readers of modern
works on psychology, gives offense to some adherents of the past. There
should, however, be no special mystery about it. It is not a new animistic
abstraction, but simply a collective word to include all the physiological
changes which escape our notice, all the forgotten experiences and impres-
sions of the past which continue to influence our desires and reflections
and conduct, even if we cannot remember them. What we can remember
at any time is indeed an infinitesimal part of what has happened to us.
We could not remember anything unless we forgot almost everything,
As Bergson says, the brain is the organ of forgetfulness as well as of
memory. Moreover, we tend, of course, to become oblivious to things
to which we are thoroughly accustomed, for habit blinds us to their
existence. So the forgotten and the habitual make up a great part of the
so-called "unconscious." . . .

We do not think enough about thinking, and much of our confusion
is the result of current illusions in regard to it. Let us forget for the
moment any impressions we may have derived from the philosophers,
and see what seems to happen in ourselves. The first thing that we notice
is that our thought moves with such incredible rapidity that it is almost
impossible to arrest any specimen of it long enough to have a look at it,
When we are offered a penny for our thoughts we always find that we

640 MAN'S MIND

have recently had so many things in mind that we can easily make a
selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On inspection we
shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of a great part of
our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial
to permit us to reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this must
be true of everyone. We do not, of course, know what goes on in other
people's heads. They tell us very little and we tell them very little. The
spigot of speech, rarely fully opened, could never emit more than driblets
of the ever renewed hogshead of thought — noch grosser wie's Heidel-
berger Pass. We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are
as silly as our own, but they probably are.

We all appear to ourselves to be thinking all the time during our wak-
ing hours, and most of us are aware that we go on thinking while we
are asleep, even more foolishly than when awake. When uninterrupted
by some practical issue we are engaged in what is now known as a reverie.
This is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our
ideas to take their own course and this course is determined by our hopes
and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment or frustration; by our
likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and resentments. There is nothing
else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves. All thought
that is not more or less laboriously controlled and directed will inevitably
circle about the beloved Ego. It is amusing and pathetic to observe this
tendency in ourselves and in others. We learn politely and generously to
overlook this truth, but if we dare to think of it, it blazes forth like the
noontide sun.

The reverie or "free association of ideas" has of late become the subject
of scientific research. While investigators are not yet agreed on the results,
or at least on the proper interpretation to be given to them, there can
be no doubt that our reveries form the chief index to our fundamental
character. They are a reflection of our nature as modified by often hidden
and forgotten experiences. We need not go into the matter further here,
for it is only necessary to observe that the reverie is at all times a potent
and in many cases an omnipotent rival to every other kind of thinking.
It doubtless influences all our speculations in its persistent tendency to
self -magnification and self-justification, which are its chief preoccupations,
but it is the last thing to make directly or indirectly for honest increase
of knowledge. Philosophers usually talk as if such thinking did not exist
or were in some way negligible. This is what makes their speculations
so unreal and often worthless.

The reverie, as any of us can see for himself, is frequently broken and
interrupted by the necessity of a second kind of thinking. We have to

THINKING 641

make practical decisions. Shall we write a letter or no? Shall we take the
subway or a bus? Shall we have dinner at seven or half past? Shall we
buy U. S. Rubber or a Government bond? Decisions are easily distinguish-
able from the free flow of the reverie. Sometimes they demand a good
deal of careful pondering and the recollection of pertinent facts; often,
however, they are made impulsively. They are a more difficult and labori-
ous thing than the reverie, and we resent having to "make up our mind"
when we are tired, or absorbed in a congenial reverie. Weighing a deci-
sion, it should be noted, does not necessarily add anything to our knowl-
edge, although we may, of course, seek further information before mak-
ing it.

RATIONALIZING

A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our
belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds
without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we are
wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly
heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an
illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their com-
panionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us,
but our self-esteem, which is threatened. We are by nature stubbornly
pledged to defend our own from attack, whether it be our person, our
family, our property, or our opinion. A United States Senator once
remarked to a friend of mine that God Almighty could not make him
change his mind on our Latin-American policy. We may surrender, but
rarely confess ourselves vanquished. In the intellectual world at least
peace is without victory.

Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convic-
tions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to
continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and
the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions
leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result
is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for
going on believing as we already do.

I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor
of the state was bidden. The chairman explained that His Excellency
could not be present for certain "good" reasons; what the "real" reasons
were the presiding officer said he would leave us to conjecture. This
distinction between "good" and "real" reasons is one of the most clarifying
and essential in the whole realm of thought. We can readily give what
seem to us "good" reasons for being a Catholic or a Mason, a Republican

642 MAN'S MIND

or a Democrat. But the "real" reasons are usually on quite a different
plane. Of course the importance of this distinction is popularly, if some-
what obscurely, recognized. The Baptist missionary is ready enough to
see that the Buddhist is not such because his doctrines would bear careful
inspection, but because he happened to be born in a Buddhist family in
Tokio. But it would be treason to his faith to acknowledge that his own
partiality for certain doctrines is due to the fact that his mother was a
member of the First Baptist Church of Oak Ridge. A savage can give
all sorts of reasons for his belief that it is dangerous to step on a man's
shadow, and a newspaper editor can advance plenty of arguments against
the Reds. But neither of them may realize why he happens to be defend-
ing his particular opinion.

The "real" reasons for our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as well
as from others. As we grow up we simply adopt the ideas presented to
us in regard to such matters as religion, family relations, property, busi-
ness, our country, and the state. We unconsciously absorb them from our
environment. They are persistently whispered in our ear by the group
in which we happen to live. Moreover, as Mr. Trotter has pointed out
[in Instincts of the Herd} these judgments, being the product of sugges-
tion and not of reasoning, have the quality of perfect obviousness, so that
to question them

... is to the believer to carry skepticism to an insane degree, and
will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to the
nature of the belief in question. When, therefore, we find ourselves
entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of
feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously
unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may
know that that opinion is a nonrational one, and probably, therefore,
founded upon inadequate evidence.

Opinions, on the other hand, which are the result of experience or of
honest reasoning do not have this quality of "primary certitude." I
remember when as a youth I heard a group of business men discussing
the question of the immortality of the soul, I was outraged by the senti-
ment of doubt expressed by one of the party. As I look back now I see
that I had at the time no interest in the matter, and certainly no least
argument to urge in favor of the belief in which I had been reared. But
neither my personal indifference to the issue, nor the fact that I had
previously given it no attention, served to prevent an angry resentment
when I heard my ideas questioned.

This spontaneous and loyal support of our preconceptions— this process

THINKING 643

of finding "good" reasons to justify our routine beliefs — is known to
modern psychologists as "rationalizing" — clearly only a new name for a
very ancient thing. Our "good" reasons ordinarl y have no value in pro-
moting honest enlightenment, because, no matter how solemnly they may
be marshaled, they are at bottom the result of personal preference or
prejudice, and not of an honest desire to seek or accept new knowledge.

In our reveries we are frequently engaged in self-justification, for we
cannot bear to think ourselves wrong, and yet have constant illustrations
of our weaknesses and mistakes. So we spend much time finding fault
with circumstances and the conduct of others, and shifting on to them
with great ingenuity the onus of our own failures and disappointments.
Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves,
or our group, accused of misapprehension or error.

All mankind, high and low, thinks in all the ways which have been
described. The reverie goes on all the time not only in the mind of the
mill hand and the Broadway show girl, but equally in weighty judges and
godly bishops. It has gone on in all the philosophers, scientists, poets, and
theologians that have ever lived. Aristotle's most abstruse speculations
were doubtless tempered by highly irrelevant reflections. He is reported
to have had very thin legs and small eyes, for which he doubtless had to
find excuses, and he was wont to indulge in very conspicuous dress and
rings and was accustomed to arrange his hair carefully. Diogenes the
Cynic exhibited the impudence of a touchy soul. His tub was his distinc-
tion. Tennyson in beginning his "Maud" could not forget his chagrin
over losing his patrimony years before as the result of an unhappy invest-
ment in the Patent Decorative Carving Company. These facts are not
recalled here as a gratuitous disparagement of the truly great, but to
insure a full realization of the tremendous competition which all really
exacting thought has to face, even in the minds of the most highly en-
dowed mortals.

And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that per-
haps almost all that had passed for social science, political economy,
politics, and ethics in the past may be brushed aside by future generations
as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached this conclusion
in regard to philosophy. Veblen and other writers have revealed the
various unperceived presuppositions of the traditional political economy,
and now comes an Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge
treatise on general sociology, devotes hundreds of pages to substantiating
a similar thesis affecting all the social sciences. This conclusion may be
ranked by students of a hundred years hence as one of the several great

644 MAN'S MIND

discoveries of our age. It is by no means fully worked out, and it is so
opposed to nature that it will be very slowly accepted by the great mass
of those who consider themselves thoughtful. As a historical student I am
personally fully reconciled to this newer view. Indeed, it seems to me
inevitable that just as the various sciences of nature were, before the
opening of the seventeenth century, largely masses of rationalizations to
suit the religious sentiments of the period, so the social sciences have
continued even to our own day to be rationalizations of uncritically
accepted beliefs and customs. . . .

HOW CREATIVE THOUGHT TRANSFORMS THE WORLD

This brings us to another kind of thought which can fairly easily be
distinguished from the three kinds described above. It has not the usual
qualities of the reverie, for it does not hover about our personal compla-
cencies and humiliations. It is not made up of the homely decisions forced
upon us by everyday needs, when we review our little stock of existing
information, consult our conventional preferences and obligations, and
make a choice of action. It is not the defense of our own cherished beliefs
and prejudices just because they are our own — mere plausible excuses for
remaining of the same mind. On the contrary, it is that peculiar species of
thought which leads us to change our mind.

It is this kind of thought that has raised man from his pristine, sub-
savage ignorance and squalor to the degree of knowledge and comfort
which he now possesses. On his capacity to continue and greatly extend
this kind of thinking depends his chance of groping his way out of the
plight in which the most highly civilized peoples of the world now find
themselves. In the past this type of thinking has been called Reason. But
so many misapprehensions have grown up around the word that some
of us have become very suspicious of it. I suggest, therefore, that we sub-
stitute a recent name and speak of "creative thought" rather than of
Reason. For this kind of meditation begets \nowledge, and knowledge
is really creative inasmuch as it ma^es things loo\ different from what
they seemed before and may indeed wor\ for their reconstruction.

In certain moods some of us realize that we are observing things or
making reflections with a seeming disregard of our personal preoccupa-
tions. We are not preening or defending ourselves; we are not faced by
the necessity of any practical decision, nor are we apologizing for believ-
ing this or that. We are just wondering and looking and mayhap seeing
what we never perceived before.

Curiosity is as clear and definite as any of our urges. We wonder what
is in a sealed telegram or in a letter in which some one else is absorbed,

THINKING 645

or what is being said in the telephone booth or in low conversation. This
inquisitiveness is vastly stimulated by jealousy, suspicion, or any hint that
we ourselves are directly or indirectly involved. But there appears to be
a fair amount of personal interest in other people's affairs even when
they do not concern us except as a mystery to be unraveled or a tale to
be told. The reports of a divorce suit will have "news value" for many
weeks. They constitute a story, like a novel or play or moving picture.
This is not an example of pure curiosity, however, since we readily iden-
tify ourselves with others, and their joys and despair then become our own.

We also take note of, or "observe," as Sherlock Holmes says, things
which have nothing to do with our personal interests and make no
personal appeal either direct or by way of sympathy. This is what Veblen
so well calls "idle curiosity." And it is usually idle enough. Some of us
when we face the line of people opposite us in a subway train impulsively
consider them in detail and engage in rapid inferences and form theories
in regard to them. On entering a room there are those who will perceive
at a glance the degree of preciousness of the rugs, the character of the
pictures, and the personality revealed by the books. But there are many,
it would seem, who are so absorbed in their personal reverie or in some
definite purpose that they have no bright-eyed energy for idle curiosity.
The tendency to miscellaneous observation we come by honestly enough,
for we note it in many of our animal relatives.

Veblen, however, uses the term "idle curiosity" somewhat ironically,
as is his wont. It is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a
very rare and indispensable thing from which almost all distinguished
human achievement proceeds. Since it may lead to systematic examination
and seeking for things hitherto undiscovered. For research is but diligent
search which enjoys the high flavor of primitive hunting. Occasionally
and fitfully idle curiosity thus leads to creative thought, which alters and
broadens our own views and aspirations and may in turn, under highly
favorable circumstances, affect the views and lives of others, even for
generations to follow. An example or two will make this unique human
process clear.

Galileo was a thoughtful youth and doubtless carried on a rich and
varied reverie. He had artistic ability and might have turned out to be
a musician or painter. When he had dwelt among the monks at Valam-
brosa he had been tempted to lead the life of a religious. As a boy he
busied himself with toy machines and he inherited a fondness for
mathematics. All these facts are of record. We may safely assume also
that, along with many other subjects of contemplation, the Pisan maidens
found a vivid place in his thoughts.

646 MAN'S MIND

One day when seventeen years old he wandered into the cathedral of
his native town. In the midst of his reverie he looked up at the lamps
hanging by long chains from the high ceiling of the church. Then some-
thing very difficult to explain occurred. He found himself no longer
thinking of the building, worshipers, or the services; of his artistic or
religious interests; of his reluctance to become a physician as his father
wished. He forgot the question of a career and even the graziosissime
donne. As he watched the swinging lamps he was suddenly wondering
if mayhap their oscillations, whether long or short, did not occupy the
same time. Then he tested this hypothesis by counting his pulse, for that
was the only timepiece he had with him.

This observation, however remarkable in itself, was not enough to
produce a really creative thought. Others may have noticed the same
thing and yet nothing came of it. Most of our observations have no assign-
able results. Galileo may have seen that the warts on a peasant's face
formed a perfect isosceles triangle, or he may have noticed with boyish
glee that just as the officiating priest was uttering the solemn words, ecce
agnus Dei, a fly lit on the end of his nose. To be really creative, ideas
have to be worked up and then "put over," so that they become a part of
man's social heritage. The highly accurate pendulum clock was one of
the later results of Galileo's discovery. He himself was led to reconsider
and successfully to refute the old notions of falling bodies. It remained
for Newton to prove that the moon was falling, and presumably all the
heavenly bodies. This quite upset all the consecrated views of the heavens
as managed by angelic engineers. The universality of the laws of gravita-
tion stimulated the attempt to seek other and equally important natural
laws and cast grave doubts on the miracles in which mankind had
hitherto believed. In short, those who dared to include in their thought
the discoveries of Galileo and his successors found themselves in a new
earth surrounded by new heavens.

On the 28th of October, 1831, three hundred and fifty years after
Galileo had noticed the isochronous vibrations of the lamps, creative
thought and its currency had so far increased that Faraday was wondering
what would happen if he mounted a disk of copper between the poles of
a horseshoe magnet. As the disk revolved an electric current was pro-
duced. This would doubtless have seemed the idlest kind of an experi-
ment to the stanch business men of the time, who, it happened, were
just then denouncing the child-labor bills in their anxiety to avail them-
selves to the full of the results of earlier idle curiosity. But should the
dynamos and motors which have come into being as the outcome of
Faraday's experiment be stopped this evening, the business man of to-day,

THINKING 647

agitated over labor troubles, might, as he trudged home past lines of
"dead" cars, through dark streets to an unlighted house, engage in a
little creative thought of his own and perceive that he and his laborers
would have no modern factories and mines to quarrel about had it not
been for the strange practical effects of the idle curiosity of scientists,
inventors, and engineers.

The examples of creative intelligence given above belong to the realm
of modern scientific achievement, which furnishes the most striking
instances of the effects of scrupulous, objective thinking. But there are,
of course, other great realms in which the recording and embodiment of
acute observation and insight have wrought themselves into the higher
life of man. The great poets and dramatists and our modern story-tellers
have found themselves engaged in productive reveries, noting and artis-
tically presenting their discoveries for the delight and instruction of those
who have the ability to appreciate them.

The process by which a fresh and original poem or drama comes into
being is doubtless analogous to that which originates and elaborates so-
called scientific discoveries; but there is clearly a temperamental differ-
ence. The genesis and advance of painting, sculpture, and music offer
still other problems. We really as yet know shockingly little about these
matters, and indeed very few people have the least curiosity about them.
Nevertheless, creative intelligence in its various forms and activities is
what makes man. Were it not for its slow, painful, and constantly dis-
couraged operations through the ages man would be no more than a
species of primate living on seeds, fruit, roots, and uncooked flesh, and
wandering naked through the woods and over the plains like a chim-
panzee. . . .

We have now examined the various classes of thinking which we can
readily observe in ourselves and which we have plenty of reasons to
believe go on, and always have been going on, in our fellow-men. We
can sometimes get quite pure and sparkling examples of all four kinds,
but commonly they are so confused and intermingled in our reverie as
not to be readily distinguishable. The reverie is a reflection of our long-
ings, exultations, and complacencies, our fears, suspicions, and disappoint-
ments. We are chiefly engaged in struggling to maintain our self-respect
and in asserting that supremacy which we all crave and which seems to
us our natural prerogative. It is not strange, but rather quite inevitable,
that our beliefs about what is true and false, good and bad, right and
wrong, should be mixed up with the reverie and be influenced by the
same considerations which determine its character and course. We resent

648 MAN'S MIND

criticisms of our views exactly as we do of anything else connected with
ourselves. Our notions of life and its ideals seem to us to be our own and
as such necessarily true and right, to be defended at all costs.

We very rarely consider, however, the process by which we gained our
convictions. If we did so, we could hardly fail to see that there was usually
little ground for our confidence in them. Here and there, in this depart-
ment of knowledge or that, some one of us might make a fair claim to
have taken some trouble to get correct ideas of, let us say, the situation in
Russia, the sources of our food supply, the origin of the Constitution, the
revision of the tariff, the policy of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church,
modern business organization, trade unions, birth control, socialism, the
excess-profits tax, preparedness, advertising in its social bearings; but only
a very exceptional person would be entitled to opinions on all of even
these few matters. And yet most of us have opinions on all these, and
on many other questions of equal importance, of which we may know
even less. We feel compelled, as self-respecting persons, to take sides
when they come up for discussion. We even surprise ourselves by our
omniscience. Without taking thought we see in a flash that it is most
righteous and expedient to discourage birth control by legislative enact-
ment, or that one who decries intervention in Mexico is clearly wrong,
or that big advertising is essential to big business and that big business
is the pride of the land. As godlike beings why should we not rejoice in
our omniscience?

It is clear, in any case, that our convictions on important matters are
not the result of knowledge or critical thought, nor, it may be added, are
they often dictated by supposed self-interest. Most of them are pure
prejudices in the proper sense of that word. We do not form them our-
selves. They are the whisperings of "the voice of the herd." We have
in the last analysis no responsibility for them and need assume none.
They are not really our own ideas, but those of others no more well
informed or inspired than ourselves, who have got them in the same care-
less and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride to revise our
ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable opinion, for such
opinion can frequently be shown to be not respectable at all. We should,
in view of the considerations that have been mentioned, resent our supine
credulity. As Trotter has remarked:

"If we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the
warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner
table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul
disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned into
advantages. . . .

THINKING 649

The "real" reasons, which explain how it is we happen to hold a
particular belief, are chiefly historical. Our most important opinions —
those, for example, having to do with traditional, religious, and moral
convictions, property rights, patriotism, national honor, the state, and
indeed all the assumed foundations of society — are, as I have already
suggested, rarely the result of reasoned consideration, but of unthinking
absorption from the social environment in which we live. Consequently,
they have about them a quality of "elemental certitude," and we especially
resent doubt or criticism cast upon them. So long, however, as we revere
the whisperings of the herd, we are obviously unable to examine them
dispassionately and to consider to what extent they are suited to the novel
conditions and social exigencies in which we find ourselves to-day.

The "real" reasons for our beliefs, by making clear their origins and
history, can do much to dissipate this emotional blockade and rid us of
our prejudices and preconceptions. Once this is done and we come
critically to examine our traditional beliefs, we may well find some of
them sustained by experience and honest reasoning, while others must be
revised to meet new conditions and our more extended knowledge. But
only after we have undertaken such a critical examination in the light of
experience and modern knowledge, freed from any feeling of "primary
certitude," can we claim that the "good" are also the "real" reasons for
our opinions.

1920

Imagination Creatrix

JOHN LIVINGSTON LOWES

From The Road to Xanadu

GREAT IMAGINATIVE CONCEPTION IS A VORTEX

into which everything under the sun may be swept. "All other
men's worlds," wrote Coleridge once, "are the poet's chaos." In that regard
"The Ancient Mariner" is one with the noble army of imaginative
masterpieces of all time. Oral traditions — homely, fantastic, barbaric, dis-
connected— which had ebbed and flowed across the planet in its unlettered
days, were gathered up into that marvel of constructive genius, the plot
of the Odyssey, and out of "a tissue of old marchen" was fashioned a
unity palpable as flesh and blood and universal as the sea itself. Well-
nigh all the encyclopedic erudition of the Middle Ages was forged and
welded, in the white heat of an indomitable will, into the steel-knot
structure of the Divine Comedy. There are not in the world, I suppose,
more appalling masses of raw fact than would stare us in the face could
we once, through some supersubtle chemistry, resolve that superb, organic
unity into its primal elements. It so happens that for the last twenty-odd
years I have been more or less occupied with Chaucer. I have tracked
him, as I have trailed Coleridge, into almost every section of eight floors
of a great library. It is a perpetual adventure among uncharted Ophirs
and Golcondas to read after him — or Coleridge. And every conceivable
sort of thing which Chaucer knew went into his alembic. It went in x
— a waif of travel-lore from the mysterious Orient, a curious bit of
primitive psychiatry, a racy morsel from Jerome against Jovinian,
alchemy, astrology, medicine, geomancy, physiognomy, Heaven only
knows what not, all vivid with the relish of the reading— it went in
stark fact, "nude and crude," and it came out pure Chaucer. The results
are as different from "The Ancient Mariner" as an English post-road
from spectre-haunted seas. But the basic operations which produced

650

IMAGINATION CREATRIX 653

them (and on this point I may venture to speak from first-hand knowl-
edge) are essentially the same.

As for the years of "industrious and select reading, steady observation,
insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs" which were dis-
tilled into the magnificent romance of the thunder-scarred yet dauntless
Rebel, voyaging through Chaos and old Night to shatter Cosmos,
pendent from the battlements of living sapphire like a star — as for those
serried hosts of facts caught up into the cosmic sweep of Milton's grandly
poised design, it were bootless to attempt to sum up in a sentence here
the opulence which countless tomes of learned comment have been unable
to exhaust. And what (in apostolic phrase) shall I more say? For the
time would fail me to tell of the SEneid, and the Orlando Furioso, and
the Faerie Queene, and Don Juan, and even Endymion, let alone the
cloud of other witnesses. The notion that the creative imagination,
especially in its highest exercise, has little or nothing to do with facts
is one of the pseudodoxia epidemica which die hard.

For the imagination never operates in a vacuum. Its stuff is always
fact of some order, somehow experienced; its product is that fact trans-
muted. I am not forgetting that facts may swamp imagination, and
remain unassimilated and untransformed. And I know, too, that this
sometimes happens even with the masters. For some of the greatest
poets, partly by virtue of their very greatness, have had, like Faust, two
natures struggling within them. They have possessed at once the instincts
of the scholar and the instincts of the artist, and it is precisely with regard
to facts that these instincts perilously clash. Even Dante and Milton and
Goethe sometimes clog their powerful streams with the accumulations of
the scholar who shared bed and board with the poet in their mortal
frames. "The Professor still lurks in your anatomy"— Dir stec\t der
Doctor noch im Leib — says Mephistopheles to Faust. But when, as in
"The Ancient Mariner," the stuff that Professors and Doctors are made
of has been distilled into quintessential poetry, then the passing miracle
of creation has been performed.

But "creation," like "creative," is one of those hypnotic words which
are prone to cast a spell upon the understanding and dissolve our think-
ing into haze. And out of this nebulous state of the intellect springs a
strange but widely prevalent idea. The shaping spirit of imagination sits
aloof, like God as he is commonly conceived, creating in some thauma-
turgic fashion out of nothing its visionary world. That and that only is
deemed to be "originality" — that, and not the imperial moulding of old

v MAN'S MIND

matter into imperishably new forms. The ways of creation are wrapt
in mystery; we may only marvel, and bow the head.

Now it is true beyond possible gainsaying that the operations which we
call creative leave us in the end confronting mystery. But that is the
fated terminus of all our quests. And it is chiefly through a deep-rooted
reluctance to retrace, so far as they are legible, the footsteps of the creative
faculty that the power is often thought of as abnormal, or at best a
splendid aberration. I know full well that this reluctance springs, with
most of us, from the staunch conviction that to follow the evolution of a
thing of beauty is to shatter its integrity and irretrievably to mar its
charm. But there are those of us who cherish the invincible belief that
the glory of poetry will gain, not lose, through a recognition of the fact
that the imagination works its wonders through the exercise, in the main,
of normal and intelligible powers. To establish that, without blinking
the ultimate mystery of genius, is to bring the workings of the shaping
spirit in the sphere of art within the circle of the great moulding forces
through which, in science and affairs and poetry alike, there emerges from
chaotic multiplicity a unified and ordered world. . . .

Creative genius, in plainer terms, works through processes which are
common to our kind, but these processes are superlatively enhanced.
The subliminal agencies are endowed with an extraordinary potency; the
faculty which conceives and executes operates with sovereign power; and
the two blend in untrammelled interplay. There is always in genius, I
imagine, the element which Goethe, who knew whereof he spoke, was
wont to designate as "the Daemonic." But in genius of the highest order
that sudden, incalculable, and puissant energy which pours up from the
hidden depths is controlled by a will which serves a vision — the vision
which sees in chaos the potentiality of Form.

. . . "The imagination," said Coleridge once, recalling a noble phrase
from Jeremy Taylor's Via Pads, ". . . sees all things in one." It sees the
Free Life — the endless flux of the unfathomed sea of facts and images —
but it sees also the controlling Form. And when it acts on what it sees,
through the long patience of the will the flux itself is transformed and
fixed in the clarity of a realized design. For there enter into imaginative
creation three factors which reciprocally interplay: the Well, and the
Vision, and the Will. Without the Vision, the chaos of elements remains
a chaos, and the Form sleeps forever in the vast chambers of unborn
designs. Yet in that chaos only could creative Vision ever see this Form.
Nor without the cooperant Will, obedient to the Vision, may the pattern

IMAGINATION CREATRIX 653

perceived in the huddle attain objective reality. Yet manifold though the
ways of the creative faculty may be, the upshot is one: from the empire
of chaos a new tract of cosmos has been retrieved; a nebula has been com-
pacted— it may be! — into a star.

Yet no more than the lesser are these larger factors of the creative
process — the storing of the Well, the Vision, and the concurrent opera-
tion of the Will — the monopoly of poetry. Through their conjunction the
imagination in the field of science, for example, is slowly drawing the
immense confusion of phenomena within the unfolding conception of
an ordered universe. And its operations are essentially the same. For
years, through intense and unremitting observation, Darwin had been
accumulating masses of facts which pointed to a momentous conclusion.
But they pointed through a maze of baffling inconsistencies. Then all at
once the flash of vision came. "I can remember," he tells us in that
precious fragment of an autobiography — "I can remember the very
spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution
occurred to me." And then, and only then, with the infinite toil of
exposition, was slowly framed from the obdurate facts the great state-
ment of the theory of evolution. The leap of the imagination, in a gar-
den 'at Woolsthorpe on a day in 1665, from the fall of an apple to an
architectonic conception cosmic in its scope and grandeur is one of
the dramatic moments in the history of human thought. But in that
pregnant moment there flashed together the profound and daring
observations and conjectures of a long period of years; and upon the
instant of illumination followed other years of rigorous and protracted
labour, before the Principia appeared. Once more there was the long,
slow storing of the Well; once more the flash of amazing vision
through a fortuitous suggestion; once more the exacting task of trans-
lating the vision into actuality. And those are essentially the stages which
Poincare observed and graphically recorded in his "Mathematical Dis-
covery." And that chapter reads like an exposition of the creative proc-
esses through which "The Ancient Mariner" came to be. With the
inevitable and obvious differences we are not here concerned. But it
is of the utmost moment to more than poetry that instead of regarding
the imagination as a bright but ineffectual faculty with which in some
esoteric fashion poets and their kind are specially endowed, we recognize
the essential oneness of its function and its ways with all the creative
endeavours through which human brains, with dogged persistence,
strive to discover and realize order in a chaotic world.

For the Road to Xanadu is the road of the human spirit, and the
imagination voyaging through chaos and reducing it to clarity and order

654 MAN'S MIND

is the symbol of all the quests which lend glory to our dust. And the
goal of the shaping spirit which hovers in the poet's brain is the clarity
and order of pure beauty. Nothing is alien to its transforming touch.
"Far or forgot to (it) is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same."
Things fantastic as the dicing of spectres on skeleton-barks, and ugly
as the slimy spawn of rotting seas, and strange as a star astray within
the moon's bright tip, blend in its vision into patterns of new-created
beauty, herrlich, wie am ersten Tag. Yet the pieces that compose the
pattern are not new. In the world of the shaping spirit, save for its
patterns, there is nothing new that was not old. For the work of the
creators is the mastery and transmutation and reordering into shapes
of beauty of the given universe within us and without us. The shapes
thus wrought are not that universe; they are "carved with figures
strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain." Yet in that brain
the elements and shattered fragments of the figures already lie, and
what the carver-creator sees, implicit in the fragments, is the unique
and lovely Form.

7927

The Psychology of Sigmund Freud

A. A. BRILL

TJSYCHOANALYSIS WAS UNKNOWN IN THIS COUNTRY
$* until I introduced it in 1908. Ever since then, I have been translating,
lecturing and writing on this subject both for physicians and laymen; and
I am happy to say that today psychoanalysis, which has encountered so
much opposition here, as it did abroad, is firmly established not only in
medicine, but also in psychology, sociology, pedagogy and anthropology.
It has not only permeated and transvalued the mental sciences, but
indirectly also belles lettres and the cultural trends of the last generation.

At the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement in this country, its
opponents and some of its lukewarm friends predicted that, like so many
other discoveries in mental therapy, psychoanalysis was destined to be
short-lived. They were poor prophets. The falsity of their prognosis can
be seen in the fact that the psychoanalytic terminology, some of which I
was the first to coin into English expressions, can now be found in all
standard English dictionaries. Words like abrcaction, transference, re-
pression, displacement, unconscious, which I introduced as Freudian con-
cepts, have been adopted and are used to give new meanings, new values
to our knowledge of normal and abnormal behavior. . . .

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, formerly Aus-
tria, now Czechoslovakia. He was brought up in Vienna, having lived
there since the age of four. In his autobiography, he states: "My parents
were Jews and I remained a Jew."

One of the arguments that has been hurled at psychoanalysis on a few
occasions is that its originator was a Jew, implying thereby that the
theories expressed by Freud do not apply to the rest of mankind. Such
an argument, which, if accepted, would also invalidate Christianity, is
too stupid to require refutation. Freud's works had the honor of forming
part of the sacred pyre on Hitler's accession to power. The fact that the
bulk of this pyre was composed of works of non-Jewish thinkers plainly
shows that truth knows no creed or race. I feel, however, that Freud's

655

656 MAN'S MIND

Jewish descent — constitution — as well as the environment to which he
was subjected because of it — fate — exerted considerable influence on his
personality. One might say that only a Jewish genius, forged in the
crucible of centuries of persecution, could have offered himself so will-
ingly on the altar of public opprobrium for the sake of demonstrating
the truths of psychoanalysis.

Freud tells us that in college he always stood first, and was hardly ever
examined. Despite the very straitened financial condition of his family,
his father wanted him to follow his own inclination in the selection of a
vocation. He had no special love for medicine at that age, nor did he
acquire it later, but rather he was stimulated by a sort of inquisitiveness
directed to human relations and objects of nature. He was very much at-
tracted to Darwin's theories because they offered the prospect of an ex-
traordinary advance of human knowledge, and he finally decided to
enter the medical school after he had read Goethe's beautiful essay, Die
Natur. . . .

While still in the university, he worked for a number of years in the
physiological laboratory of the famous Ernst Briicke, who was his teacher
and gave him as his first task the histology of the nervous system. With
only a short interruption Freud worked in the Institute from 1876 until
1882. Then, he discovered, that with the exception of psychiatry, the other
medical specialties did not attract him. He graduated from the medical
school in 1881, and in 1882 he entered Vienna's well known Allgemeine
Kranfenhaus (general hospital). There, he went through the usual rou-
tine services, but continued his studies on the anatomy of the brain, in
which he became very proficient. It is not generally known that in his
early days Freud wrote a number of works on diseases of the nervous
system, which were very highly regarded by his contemporaries.

In 1885 he was attracted by the fame of Charcot, who was applying
hypnotism to the study and treatment of hysteria and other functional
nervous diseases. He remained for a year in Paris as a pupil and trans-
lator of this master's works. In 1886 he returned to his native Vienna and
"married the girl who waited for me in a far-off city longer than four
years." He then entered private practice, but continued as an instructor
in the university.

What Freud saw in Charcot's Clinic made a very deep impression on
him. While still a student, he also witnessed a performance of the "mag-
netiser," Hansen, in which a test person became deadly pale when she
merged into a cataleptic rigidity, and remained so during the whole dura-
tion of the catalepsy. This convinced Freud of the genuineness of hyp-
notic phenomena, a conviction which remained in him despite the fact

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 657

that the contemporary professors of psychiatry considered hypnosis fraud-
ulent and dangerous. From Charcot he learned that hypnosis could pro-
duce hysterical symptoms as well as remove them, and that hysteria could
also occur in men; and from Liebault and Bernheim of the Nancy School
he learned that suggestion alone, without hypnotism, was as efficacious as
suggestion employed in hypnosis.

When Freud returned to Vienna and demonstrated what he had learned
from Charcot, he met with considerable opposition. It was the age of
physical therapy, when physicians knew nothing about the psychic fac-
tors in disease, when everything was judged by the formula, Mens sana
in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). Every symptom was
explained on the basis of some organic lesion, and if nothing physical was
discovered, it was assumed that there must be something in the brain to
account for the disturbance. The treatment was based on this same de-
ficient understanding; drugs, hydrotherapy, and electrotherapy were the
only agents that physicians could use. When the patient was excited, he
received some sedative; if he was depressed and felt fatigue, he was given
a tonic; and when drugs failed, electricity or cold baths were recom-
mended. All these remedies gave only temporary alleviation, mainly
through suggestion. Most of the thoughtful physicians were fully cog-
nizant of this helpless state, but there was nothing else to be done.

During the first few years of his private practice Freud relied mostly
on hypnotism and electrotherapy, but he soon realized that the latter
failed to benefit the patient, and that the whole idea of electric treatment
for functional nervous diseases was fantastic. He had some good results,
however, from hypnotic therapy; but he soon found that not every pa-
tient could be hypnotized, and that even those who could be, did not
remain permanently cured. Attributing such failures to a deficiency in
his technique, to an inability on his part to put every patient into a state
of somnambulism with its consequent amnesia, he spent some weeks in
Nancy with Liebault and Bernheim, to whom he took a recalcitrant pa-
tient for treatment. Bernheim made a number of efforts to produce a
deep hypnotic state in the patient, but finally had to admit failure. Freud,
though disappointed with the technique of hypnotism, learned a great
deal from the experiments witnessed there concerning the forceful psychic
forces which were still to be investigated. Very soon thereafter, he grad-
ually gave up hypnotism and developed what he called "psychoanalysis."
In this connection he makes the following interesting statement: "The
importance of hypnotism for the history of the development of psycho-
analysis must not be too lightly estimated. Both in theoretic as well as in

658 MAN'S MIND

therapeutic aspects, psychoanalysis is the administrator of the estate left
by hypnotism."

In order to give a full account of the development of psychoanalysis, it
will be necessary to go back a few years. While Freud still worked in
Briicke's laboratory, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Josef Breuer, a
prominent general practitioner of high scientific standing. Although
Breuer was 14 years older than Freud, they soon became friends and
frequently discussed their scientific views and experiences. Knowing
Freud's interest in neurology and psychiatry, Breuer gave him an account
of a very interesting case of hysteria which he had studied and cured by
hypnosis from 1880 to 1882. As this unique case was of the greatest im-
portance to the development of psychoanalysis, it will be worth while to
give a few details.

The patient concerned was a young girl of unusual education and
talent, who had become ill while nursing her father to whom she was very
much attached. Dr. Breuer states that when he took her as a patient she
presented a variegated picture of paralyses with contractures, inhibitions
and states of psychic confusion. Through an accidental observation
Breuer discovered that the patient could be freed from such disturbances
of consciousness if she could be enabled to give verbal expression to the
affective phantasies which dominated her. Breuer elaborated this experi-
ence into a method of treatment. He hypnotized her and urged her to
tell him what oppressed her at the time, and by this simple method he
freed her from all her symptoms. The significance of the case lay in this
fact, that in her waking state the patient knew nothing about the origin
of her symptoms, but once hypnotized, she immediately knew the con-
nection between her symptoms and some of her past experiences. All her
symptoms were traceable to experiences during the time when she had
nursed her sick father. Moreover, the symptoms were not arbitrary and
senseless, but could be traced to definite experiences and forgotten remi-
niscences of that emotional situation.

A common feature of all the symptoms consisted in the fact that they
had come into existence in situations in which an impulse to do something
had to be foregone because other motives suppressed it. The symptom
appeared as a substitute for the unperformed act. As a rule, the symptom
was not the result of one single "traumatic" scene, but of a sum of many
similar situations. If the patient in a state of hypnosis recalled hallu-
cinatorily the act which she had suppressed in the past, and if she now
brought it to conclusion under the stress of a freely generated affect, the
symptom was wiped away never to return again. It was remarked that
the causes which had given origin to the symptom resembled the trau-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 659

matic factors described by Charcot in his experimental cases. What was
still more remarkable was that these traumatic causes with their con-
comitant psychic feelings had been entirely lost to the patient's memory,
as if they had never happened, while their results — that is, the symptoms,
had continued unchanged, as if unaffected by the wear and tear of time,
until attacked by Breuer through hypnosis.

Although Breuer, as was mentioned above, told Freud about this won-
derful discovery, he did not publish his findings. Freud could not under-
stand why. The discovery seemed to him of inestimable value. But fol-
lowing his return from Nancy in 1889 with the cognition of hypnotic
suggestive therapy, Freud decided to test Bfeuer's method in his own
cases, and found ample corroboration of its efficacy during a period of
many years. He then urged Breuer to report with him the results of his
method, and in 1893 they jointly issued a preliminary communication,
On the Psychic Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena.

As can be seen, Breuer was the spiritual creator of this method of treat-
ment and Freud always gave him full credit for it, although they differed
from the very beginning in their basic interpretation of the symptoms.
They called their treatment the "cathartic method" because they con-
cluded that the efficacy of it rested on the mental and emotional purging,
catharsis, which the patient went through during the treatment. The other
conclusion drawn by the authors was that hysteria was a disease of the
past, and that, as Freud put it later, the symptom was, as it were, a
monument to some disagreeable and forgotten (repressed) episode from
the patient's life. The patient, however, did not know the meaning of the
monument any more than the average German would know the meaning
of the Bunker Hill monument. This concept for the first time showed the
importance of distinguishing between conscious and unconscious states,
which was later amplified and developed by Freud as the psychology of
the unconscious. New meaning was given to the affective or emotional
factors of life, their fluctuations and dynamism. The symptom was the
result of a dammed-up or strangulated affect. The patient could not give
vent to the affect because the situation in question made this impossible,
so that the idea was intentionally repressed from consciousness and ex-
cluded from associative elaboration. As a result of this repression, the
sum of energy which could not be discharged took a wrong path to bodily
innervation, and thus produced the symptom. In other words, the symp-
tom was the result of a conversion of psychic energy into a physical mani-
festation, such as pain or paralysis. Thus, a pain in the face, diagnosed
as neuralgia, might be due to an insult which would ordinarily evoke the
thought, "I feel as if he had slapped me in the face." As this insult could

660 MAN'S MIND

not be retaliated against, the strangulated energy remained in a state of
repression and gave rise to "neuralgia." The cure or the discharge was
effected through what the authors called the process of abreaction. The
hypnotized patient was led back to the repressed episodes and allowed to
give free vent in speech and action to the feelings which were originally
kept out of consciousness.

Breuer's and Freud's discoveries were not received as sympathetically
as the authors expected. Their psychogenetic views of hysteria were in-
teresting, but too revolutionary to be accepted by their older colleagues.
On the other hand, in spite of much discussion, there was as yet, no real
antagonism. That did not arise until later, when Freud began to stress
the sexual factor in the neuroses. In his report of Anna O., Breuer stated:
"The sexual element in her make-up was astonishingly undeveloped."
Throughout their book the sexual elements, of which there were many in
every case, were treated no differently than the other factors in the pa-
tients' lives. How Freud happened to become interested in sex and then
stress its importance in the etiology of the neuroses he tells us later.

Very soon after the appearance of the Studies in Hysteria, Breuer with-
drew from the field. He was, after all, unprepared for this specialty, and
inasmuch as he enjoyed a stable and lucrative practice and a high reputa-
tion as a family physician, the storm which began to gather as his col-
laborator advanced deeper into the etiology of the neuroses more or less
frightened him. Freud, therefore, continued alone to elaborate and per-
fect the instrument left by his erstwhile friend and collaborator; and as a
result, the cathartic method underwent numerous modifications, the most
important of which was the giving-up of hypnotism in favor of free asso-
ciation. As pointed out above, not everybody could be hypnotized, and
since hypnotism was absolutely indispensable to the cathartic treatment
at that time, many a worthy patient had had to be given up just because
he or she could not be hypnotized. Freud was also dissatisfied with the
therapeutic results of catharsis based on hypnotism. Although cures were
often very striking, they were often of very short duration and depended
mainly on the personal relation between the patient and physician. More-
over, Freud always entertained a feeling of antipathy to the application of
hypnotism and suggestion to patients. Speaking of his visit to Bernheim
in 1889, he states: "But I can remember even then a feeling of gloomy
antagonism against this tyranny of suggestion. When a patient who did
not prove to be yielding was shouted at: 'What are you doing? Vous vous
contresuggestionnez!\ I said to myself that this was an evident injustice
and violence."

Yet his visit to Bernheim later helped him out of the dilemma of not

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 661

being able to hypnotize some patients. He recalled the following experi-
ment which he had witnessed there, the object of which was to overcome
the post-hypnotic amnesia: On being awakened, the patient could not re-
member anything that had transpired during hypnosis, but when he was
urged to make an effort to recall what had been said to him, he eventually
remembered everything. Freud applied the same method to those patients
whom he could not hypnotize. He urged them to tell him everything that
came to their minds, to leave out nothing, regardless of whether they con-
sidered it relevant or not. He persuaded them to give up all conscious
reflection, abandon themselves to calm concentration, follow their spon-
taneous mental occurrences, and impart everything to him. In this way
he finally obtained those free associations which lead to the origin of
the symptoms. As he developed this method, he found that it was not as
simple as he had thought, that these so-called free associations were really
not free, but were determined by unconscious material which had to be
analyzed and interpreted. He therefore designated this new technique
psychoanalysis. The cathartic method, however, was ever preserved as a
sort of nucleus of psychoanalysis despite the expansions and modifications
which Freud gradually made as he proceeded with the new technique.

In the course of working with free associations, Freud gained a tre-
mendous amount of insight into the play of forces of the human mind
which he could not have obtained through the former therapeutic pro-
cedure. The question as to how the patient could have forgotten so many
outer and inner experiences, which could be recalled only in a state of
hypnosis and which were difficult to bring to consciousness by means of
free association, soon became revealed to him. The forgotten material
represented something painful, something disagreeable, or something
frightful, obnoxious to the ego of the patient, which he did not like to
think of consciously. In order to make it conscious, the physician had to
exert himself mightily to overcome the patient's resistance, which kept
these experiences in a state of repression and away from consciousness.
The neurosis proved to be the result of a psychic conflict between two
dynamic forces, impulse and resistance, in the course of which struggle
the ego withdrew from the disagreeable impulse. As a result of this with-
drawal, the obnoxious impulse was kept from access to consciousness as
well as from direct motor discharge, but it retained its impulsive energy.

This unconscious process actually is a primary defense mechanism,
comparable to an effort to fly away from something. But in order to keep
the disagreeable idea from consciousness, the ego has to contend against
the constant thrust of the repressed impulse which is ever searching for
expression. But despite constant exertion by the ego, the repressed, ob-

662 MAN'S MIND

noxious impulse often finds an outlet through some by-path, and thu?
invalidates the intention of the repression. The repressed impulsive energy
then settles by this indirect course on some organ or part of the body, and
this innervation constitutes the symptom. Once this is established, the
patient struggles against the symptom in the same way as he did against
the originally repressed impulses.

To illustrate these mechanisms let us consider the case of an hysterical
young woman. For some months she was courted by a young man pro-
claiming his ardent love for her. Suddenly one day he made an unsuccess-
ful sexual assault upon her, and then disappeared, leaving her in a state of
deep depression. She could not confide in her mother, because from the
very beginning of the affair the mother had forbidden her to see the young
man. Three years later I found her suffering from numerous hysterical
conversion symptoms, and attacks of an epileptic character which had
existed for some two and a half years. Analysis showed that the attacks
represented symbolically what had taken place at the time of the abortive
sexual assault. Every detail of the so-called epileptiform attack — every
gesture, every movement — was a stereotyped repetition of the sexual
attack which the patient was reproducing unconsciously. The other symp-
toms, too, were directly traceable to the love affair.

The whole process of this disease can readily be understood if we bear
in mind the various steps of this love situation. The young woman was
healthy and, biontically speaking, ready for mating; her primitive instinct
of sex was striving for fulfillment. Consciously, she could think of love
only in the modern sense of the term, in which the physical elements are
deliberately kept out of sight. Her middle-class, religious environment
precluded any illicit sexual activity as far as she was consciously con-
cerned. But, behind it all, the sexual impulses were actively reaching out
for maternity. She was sincerely in love with the man, but naturally
thought of love as marriage, with everything that goes with it. The sudden
shock of coming face to face with the physical elements of sex left a ter-
rific impression on her mind: on the one hand, consciously, she rejected
vehemently the lover's physical approaches, and on the other hand, un-
consciously, she really craved them. For weeks afterwards she vividly
lived over in her mind everything that had happened to her, and, now and
then, even fancied herself as having yielded — a thought which was im-
mediately rejected and replaced by feelings of reproach and disgust. Last,
but not least, she actually missed the love-making, which she had enjoyed
for months prior to the attempted assault. As she could not unburden her-
self to anyone, she tried very hard to forget everything, and finally seem-
ingly succeeded. But a few weeks later she began to show the symptoms

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 663

which finally developed into the pathogenic picture which was diagnosed
as epilepsy or hystero-epilepsy. These symptoms were the symbolization,
or, if you will, a dramatization of the conflict between her primitive self
and her ethical self, between what Freud now calls the Id and the Ego.

To make ourselves more explicit, it will be necessary to say something
about the elements of the psychic apparatus. According to Freud's formu-
lation the child brings into the world an unorganized chaotic mentality
called the Id, the sole aim of which is the gratification of all needs, the
alleviation of hunger, self-preservation, and love, the preservation of the
species. However, as the child grows older, the part of the id which comes
in contact with the environment through the senses learns to know the
inexorable reality of the outer world and becomes modified into what
Freud calls the ego. This ego, possessing awareness of the environment,
henceforth strives to curb the lawless id tendencies whenever they attempt
to assert themselves incompatibly. The neurosis, as we see it here, was,
therefore, a conflict between the ego and the id. The ego, aware of the
forces of civilization, religion and ethics, refused to allow motor discharge
to the powerful sexual impulses emanating from the lawless id, and thus
blocked them from attainment of the object towards which they aimed.
The ego then defended itself against these impulses by repressing them.
The young lady in question seemingly forgot this whole episode. Had the
repression continued unabated, she would have remained healthy. But
the repressed material struggled against this fate, finally broke through
as a substitutive formation on paths over which the ego had no control,
and obtruded itself on the ego as symptoms. As a result of this process,
the ego found itself more or less impoverished, its integrity was threat-
ened and hurt, and hence it continued to combat the symptom in the
lame way as it had defended itself against the original id impulses.

This whole process constitutes the picture of the neuroses, or rather of
the transference neuroses, which comprise hysteria, anxiety hysteria, and
the compulsion neuroses, in contradistinction to the so-called narcistic
neuroses, melancholic depressions, and to the psychoses, schizophrenia,
paranoid conditions and paranoia proper, in which the underlying mech-
anisms are somewhat different. In a psychosis, as will be shown later, the
illness results from a conflict between the ego and the outer world, and in
the narcistic neurosis from a conflict between the ego and the super-ego.
For just as the ego is a modified portion of the id as a result of contact
with the outer world, the super-ego represents a modified part of the ego,
formed through experiences absorbed from the parents, especially from
the father. The super-ego is the highest mental evolution attainable by
man, and consists of a precipitate of all prohibitions and inhibitions, all

664 MAN'S MIND

the rules of conduct which are impressed on the child by his parents and
by parental substitutes. The feeling of conscience depends altogether on
the development of the super-ego.

From the description given here of the mechanism of the neurosis,
scant as it is, one can already see the great role attributed by Freud to
the unconscious factor of the mind. Psychoanalysis has been justly called
the "psychology of depths" because it has emphasized the role of the un-
conscious mental processes. Unlike those psychologists and philosophers
who use such terms as conscious, co-conscious, and sub-conscious in a
very loose and confused manner, Freud conceives consciousness simply as
an organ of perception. One is conscious or aware of those mental proc-
esses which occupy one at any given time. In contrast to this, the un-
conscious is utterly unknown and cannot be voluntarily recalled. No
person can bring to light anything from his unconscious unless he is made
to recall it by hypnosis, or unless it is interpreted for him by psychoanaly-
sis. Midway between conscious and unconscious there is a fore-conscious
or pre-conscious, which contains memories of which one is unaware, but
which one can eventually recall with some effort.

This structure of a conscious fore-conscious, and an actual unconscious,
is based on the attempt which Freud made to conceive the psychic appa-
ratus as a composition of a number of forces or systems. It is a theoretical
classification, which seems, however, to work well in practice. Bearing in
mind these spatial divisions, we can state that whereas the dream is the
royal road to the unconscious, most of the mechanisms discussed in the
Psychopathology of Everyday Life belong to the fore-conscious system.
This work was written after Freud became convinced that there is noth-
ing arbitrary or accidental in psychic life, be it normal or abnormal. For
the very unconscious forces which he found in the neuroses he also found
in the common faulty actions of everyday life, like ordinary forgetting of
familiar names, -slips of the tongue, mistakes in reading or writing, which
had hitherto been considered accidental and unworthy of explanation.
Freud shows in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life that a rapid re-
flection or a short analysis always demonstrates the disturbing influence
behind such slips, and conclusively proves that the same disturbances,
differing only in degree, are found in every person, and that the gap be-
tween the neurotic and the so-called normal is, therefore, very narrow.

The dream, according to Freud, represents the hidden fulfillment of
an unconscious wish. But the wishes which it represents as fulfilled are
the very same unconscious wishes which are repressed in neurosis. Dream-
ing is a normal function of the mind; it is the guardian of sleep in so far
as it strives to release tensions generated by unattainable wishes — tensions

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 665

which, if not removed, might keep the person from sleeping. The dream
is not always successful in its efforts; sometimes it oversteps the limits of
propriety; it goes too far; and then the dreamer is awakened by the
super-ego.

Without going further into the psychology of the dream, enough has
been said to show that these twin discoveries — that non-conscious psychic
processes are active in every normal person, expressing themselves in
inhibitions and other modifications of intentional acts, and that the
dreams of mentally healthy persons are not differently constructed from
neurotic or psychotic symptoms — gave rise not only to a New Psychology,
but to fruitful investigations in many other fields of human knowledge.
The ability to interpret the dreams of today made it possible also to
interpret the dreams of yesterday. Freudian literature, therefore, abounds
in studies throwing new light on mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and
ethnology; and psychoanalysis has become as important to the non-medi-
cal sciences as to the therapy of the neuroses. . . .

I have always found it hard to understand why Freud's views on sex
roused so much opposition. Freud did not enter that realm voluntarily,
but was forced by a natural course of events into taking account of the
sexual factor in neuroses. Following the discovery of the psychogenesis
of hysterical symptoms, first through Breuer's cathartic method and later
through the technique of "free association," Freud was led, step by step,
to discover and explore the realm of infantile sexuality. This discovery
was based entirely on empiric material. In probing for the origin of
hysterical symptoms, in tracing them back as far as possible, even into
childhood, Freud found physical and psychical activities of a definitely
sexual nature in the earliest ages of childhood. The necessary conclusion
was that the traumas underlying the symptoms were invariably of a sex-
ual nature, since all his cases produced similar findings. Finally, therefore,
he concluded that sexual activities in childhood could not be considered
abnormal, but were on the contrary normal phenomena of the sexual
instinct.

In following up these discoveries it was natural that he should also in-
vestigate the role of sexuality in the extensive syndrome of neurasthenia.
To his surprise Freud found that all his so-called neurastheiiics exhibited
some sexual abuses. ... In the course of these investigations he was able
to bring order into the field of neurasthenia — that "garbage can of medi-
cine," as Forel aptly called it — by separating from others those cases which
were mainly characterized by anxiety. The results he embodied in his
classic paper, On the Right to Separate from Neurasthenia a Definite
Symptom-Complex as "Anxiety Neurosis" in which he called attention

666 MAN'S MIND

for the first time to the relation between anxiety and sex. The pursuit
of studies in this direction brought him at length to the conviction that
all neuroses represent a general disturbance of the sexual functions;
that the actual neuroses (neurasthenia and anxiety neuroses) result from
a direct chemical or toxic disturbance, while the psychoneuroses (hysteria
and compulsion neuroses) represent the psychic expression of these dis-
turbances. This conclusion, based at first on explorations in the sexual
life of adults, but reenforced and confirmed since 1908 through analyses
of children, was finally compressed into the famous dictum that "In a
normal sex life no neurosis is possible"

Freud was not the first to discover sexual difficulties in man. One need
only think of literature throughout the ages to realize that there was
abundant material on the subject long before the appearance of Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Freud's special merit lies in the fact
that before him sex had been treated as an isolated phenomenon, or as
(more or less) an abnormality, whereas he paid it the respect of con-
sidering it as a component of the normal personality. In the words of Dr.
James J. Putnam, former professor of neurology at Harvard University,
"Freud has made considerable addition to this stock of knowledge, but he
has done also something of greater consequence than this. He has worked
out, with incredible penetration, the part which the instinct plays in every
phase of human life and in the development of human character, and
has been able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that
psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life."
Dr. Putnam wrote those words in his introduction to my first translation
(1910) of Freud's three essays on sex, and I can think of no finer esti-
mate of Freud's contribution to sexology.

In his study of sex, Freud kept steadily in mind the total human per-
sonality. His formulation of infantile sexuality has opened new fields of
interest in the realm of child study and education which already are
yielding good results. Another concept which has been enormously help-
ful to physicians and educators is Freud's libido theory. In psychoanalysis
libido signifies that quantitatively changeable and not at present meas-
urable energy of the sexual instinct which is usually directed to an out-
side object. It comprises all those impulses which deal with love in the
broad sense. Its main component is sexual love; and sexual union is its
aim; but it also includes self-love, love for parents and children, friend-
ship, attachments to concrete objects, and even devotion to abstract ideas.

For those who are unacquainted with Freud's theories of the neuroses,
it will not be amiss to add a few remarks on the paths taken by the libido
in neurotic states. The homestead of the libido is the ego; in the child the

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 667

whole libido is centered in the ego, and we designate it as ego libido. The
child may be said to be purely egoistic at first; bat as he grows older and
reaches the narcistic stage of development, we speak of narcistic libido,
because the former ego libido has now become erotically tinged. Still later,
when the child has successfully passed through the early phases of devel-
opment and can transfer his libido to objects outside himself, that is,
when he is genitally pubescent, we speak of object libido. Libido thus can
be directed to outside objects or can be withdrawn back to the ego. A great
many normal and pathological states depend on the resulting inter-
changes between these two forces. The transference neuroses, hysteria
and compulsion neuroses, are determined by some disturbance in the
give-and-take of object libido, and hence are curable by psychoanalytic
therapy, whereas the narcistic neuroses, or the psychoses which are
mainly controlled by narcistic libido, can be studied and helped, but can-
not as yet be cured by analysis. The psychotic is, as a rule, inaccessible to
this treatment because he is unable to transfer sufficient libido to the an-
alyst. The psychotic is either too suspicious or too interested in his own
inner world to pay any attention to the physician.

But leaving this problem to the psychoanalytic therapist, one must agree
with Freud that by broadening the term sex into love or libido, much is
gained for the understanding of the sexual activity of the normal person,
of the child, and of the pervert. As will be shown later, the activities
of all three spring from the same source, but the manifestations of each
depend on the accidental factors to which they have been subjected by
their early environments. Moreover, the libido concept loosens sexuality
from its close connection with the genitals and establishes it as a more
comprehensive physical function, which strives for pleasure in general,
and only secondarily enters into the service of propagation. It also adds
to the sexual sphere those affectionate and friendly feelings to which we
ordinarily apply the term love. To illustrate the application of the libido
concept clinically, let us take the case of a nervous child, keeping in mind
Freud's dictum that no neurosis is possible in a wholly normal sexual life
— a teaching which has aroused more resistances against psychoanalysis
than any other utterance of Freud.

An apparently normal girl of about four became very nervous, refused
most of her food, had frequent crying spells and tantrums, with conse-
quent loss of weight, malaise, and insomnia, so that her condition be-
came quite alarming. After the ordinary medical measures had been
found of no avail, I was consulted. The case was so simple that I could
not understand why no one had thought of the cure before I came on the
scene. The child had begun to show the symptoms enumerated above,

668 MAN'S MIND

about two months after her mother was separated from her, and she was
cured soon after her mother returned to her. I cannot go into the many
details of this interesting case, but one can readily see that it differed
materially from the case of the young woman mentioned earlier. There
we dealt with a disturbance of adult sexuality, here with an emotional
disturbance based on a deprivation of mother love in a very sensitive
or neurotic child. Nevertheless, it was a disturbance in the child's love
life

. . . Sublimation, another term coined by Freud, is a process of deflect-
ing libido or sexual-motive activity from human objects to new objects
of a non-sexual, socially valuable nature.

Sublimation gives justification for broadening the concept of sex. Most
of our so-called feelings of tenderness and affection, which color so
many of our activities and relations in life, originally form part of pure
sexuality, and are later inhibited and deflected to higher aims. Thus, I
have in mind a number of benevolent people who contributed much of
their time and money to the protection and conservation of animals, who
were extremely aggressive in childhood and ruthless Nimrods as adults.
Their accentuated aggression originally formed a part of their childhood
sexuality; then, as a result of training, it was first inhibited and directed
to animals, and later altogether repressed and changed into sympathy.
Now and then, we encounter cases in which repression and sublimation
do not follow each other in regular succession, owing to some weakness
or fixation which obstructs the process of development. This may lead
to paradoxical situations. For example, a man, who was notorious as a
great lover of animals, suffered while riding his favorite pony from sud-
den attacks during which he beat the animal mercilessly until he was
exhausted, and then felt extreme remorse and pity for the beast. He
would then dismount, pat the horse, appeasing him with lumps of sugar,
and walk him home — sometimes a distance of three or four miles. We
cannot here go into any analysis of this interesting case; all we can say
is that the horse represented a mother symbol, and that the attacks, in
which cruelty alternated with compassion, represented the ambivalent feel-
ing of love and hatred which the patient unconsciously felt for his
mother.

This patient was entirely changed by analysis, and although he has not
given up his interest in animals and still contributes much to their com-
fort, he is no longer known to the neighborhood boys as "the man who
pays a dollar for a sick cat or sick dog." Psychoanalytic literature is rich
in clinical material which demonstrates the great benefits accrued from
Freud's amplification of the sex concept. It not only gives us an under-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 669

standing of the broad ramifications of sexual energy hitherto undreamed
of, but it has also furnished us with an instrument for treatment and
adjustment of many unfortunates who are no more responsible for their
perversions than is the victim of infantile paralysis for his malady.

In his effort to understand the mechanism of the expressions observable
in those erroneous actions illustrated in the Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, as well as the distortions in dreams, Freud discerned a remarkable
resemblance between these distortions and those found in wit. The fol-
lowing slip of the tongue shows that a slight substitution of one letter not
only uncovers the real truth, but also provokes mirth. It was related to
me many years ago by one of my patients. She was present at an evening
dance of a wealthy, but not too generous, host, which continued until
about midnight, when everybody expected a more or less substantial
supper. Instead, just sandwiches and lemonade were served. Theodore
Roosevelt was then running for President for the second time, under
the slogan, "He gave us a square deal." While they were disappointedly
consuming this modest repast, the guests were discussing the coming elec-
tion with the host, and one of them remarked, "There is one fine thing
about Teddy; he always gives you a square meal."

This lapsus linguae not only disclosed unwittingly what the speaker
thought of the supper, discharging his hidden disappointment, but it
also provoked an outburst of laughter among the guests, for they, through
identification with the speaker, found outlet for their own disappoint-
ment. But unlike the speaker and the host, who were embarrassed by the
mistake, the others experienced a sudden relaxation of the tension gener-
ated by disappointment and resentment, which expressed itself in laugh-
ter. This slight distortion changed the whole atmosphere of the party.
Instead of resentful tension, the majority of the guests now felt relaxed
and pleased. There is no doubt that there is a definite connection between
faulty actions, dreams and wit. In all of them, the unconscious underly-
ing thoughts are brought to consciousness in some sort of disguise, as if
to say, "The truth cannot always be told openly, but somehow it does
come out."

. . . Freud's interest in wit was a logical consequence of his free associ-
ation technique. Once he became convinced that nothing must be ignored
— that whatever the patient expressed, be it in mimicry or in sounds,
formed part of an effort to release something indirectly because circum-
stances prevented direct expression — once this fact dawned upon him, it
was simply a question of classifying the various forms of distortion and
showing in what function of the psychic apparatus they were manifested.
The mechanisms of condensation, displacement, substitution, illogical

670 MAN'S MIND

thinking, absurdity, indirect expressions, elisions, and representation
through the opposite, are all present in everyday conversation, but such
conventional inaccuracies glide by without any evident impediments.
When the thought in question meets with inner resistances, however, a
lapse of some kind occurs, which the speaker recognizes and at once ex-
cuses by some such expression as "I mean . . ." or "Oh, I made a mis-
take." The average person readily accepts such excuses, not realizing
that by the slip of the tongue the speaker has unconsciously betrayed his
resistance to something in the present situation. The disguises seen in the
simple lapses of everyday life are even more evident in dreams because
censorship is more or less abolished during sleep; but fundamentally
they are the same. In wit these mental disguises are especially evident,
but here they are utilized to produce pleasure. They, too, are products
of the unconscious, and show that no matter how much restriction civi-
lization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to
circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved;
the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for
wit. Only relatively civilized people have a sense of humor. The child
and the true primitive show no such mechanisms. The child like the
savage is still natural and frank. When the child begins to dream, which
shows that repressive forces are already at work, he also shows the
beginnings of a sense of humor.

The most pronounced psychopathological expressions which point to
a deep-seated disturbance are hallucinations and delusions, which occur
in adult psychotics and show a somewhat different kind of disguise. The
hallucination as a verbal expression is neither witty nor in any other way
distorted. The only thing peculiar about it is that the patient hears, sees,
or feels something which is not perceived by anyone else. To be sure, the
patient's statements do not concur with the objective facts; yet he is not
lying; subjectively speaking, he actually perceives everything he says he
does. But we know from Freud that hallucinations represent outward
projections of inner feelings. Thus, a woman who has seemingly been
living quite contentedly with her husband for five years, hears people say
that she is a "bad woman," that her husband is divorcing her, and that
she has had illicit relations with a well known movie star. At the same
time she complains of peculiar feelings like pin-pricks and electricity
in certain parts of her body. These statements could be true, but they
are not. We, therefore, call them hallucinatory.

And indeed, the whole picture of the disease in this case showed that
the woman suffered from hallucinations of hearing, sight, and sensation.
Their meaning became plain when her mother informed me that her son-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD 671

in-law had been impotent all these years, but that her daughter neverthe-
less loved him and would not consider leaving him. The hallucinations
depicted the wish to be divorced and be married to a real man as a recom-
pense for her drab existence. The annoyance and displeasure caused by
"all that talk" and by the peculiar prickling sensations, represented the
pangs of conscience, or the feeling of guilt which accompanied her erotic
phantasies. The distortion in this whole picture consisted of a fusion of
feelings and ideas which had played a part in the conflict in the mind of
this sensitive patient. She could not decide one way or the other, so she
tore herself entirely away from reality and behaved, as we say, dcreis-
tically. She abandoned all logic and objectified her phantasies in disguised
fashion. . . .

It is quite clear that the distortions manifested in the psychoses are
shown by the whole behavior of the person rather than through verbal
expressions. Verbal distortions as seen in lapses, errors, blunders in speech
and action, are immediate responses to a struggle between the ego and
the id. No matter how anxious we are to hide our true nature in adjust-
ing ourselves to the repressive forces of civilization, repression sometimes
fails and our real desires come to the surface. The dream is a hidden ful-
fillment of a repressed wish, or a direct attempt to obtain in phantasy
what is denied us in reality. Wit is a direct effort to make use of dis-
tortions in order to obtain pleasure from otherwise forbidden sources.
Both lapses and dreams are momentary illusions which render a very
quick and very brief service to the organism. Wit, on the other hand, is
a conscious mechanism for the production of pleasure, the highest or
latest development of civilization in this direction. We like to tell jokes
and listen to them because for the moment we not only forget inexorable
reality, but also obtain pleasure at the expense of our hardships.

But in all these phenomena we remain in touch with reality; the mis-
take, the dream and the joke amply demonstrate this. The psychosis ex-
hibits alone no compromise with reality, turns its back on reality, as it
were. Yet, even in a psychosis, symptoms show that there is a constant
struggle between fancy and reality. A chronic schizophrenic may remain
in a hospital for years in a state of indifference, but now and then he
may suddenly act like a rational being. Sometimes a severe shock, such
as an accident or illness which threatens his self-preservative instinct,
brings the schizophrenic back to reality for a time. The latest form of
therapy for schizophrenics is based on this very idea. I am referring to
the insulin or, as it is called, the shock therapy, because the patient re-
ceives such a shock through the hypoglycemia that for a time at least he
gives up his phantasy world. But it matters little whether hypoglycemia

672 MAN'S MIND

lures or only produces a transient change; the fact that schizophrenics
occasionally return to normality spontaneously and then relapse, and the
fact that an accidental or experimental shock can drive them back to
reality at least for a time, clearly shows that the psychotic, too, is not al-
together detached from reality. . . .

That the world which at first turned its back on him [Freud] has now
recognized his great services to science and culture is shown by the many
honors that have been showered upon him within the last few years. To
mention only one of many: His eightieth birthday was an international
event. It was celebrated in Vienna at the Wiener Konzerthaus and was
attended by distinguished scientists from Vienna and abroad. The birth-
day oration, which was delivered by Thomas Mann, is a masterpiece
which has been translated into many languages.

Brain Storms and Brain Waves

GEORGE W. GRAY

From The Advancing Front of Medicine

WHILE HE WAS ATTENDING A GROUP OF DRUG
addicts at a sanitarium in Berlin in 1927, it occurred to Dr. Man-
fred Sakel to try insulin on them. This hormone promotes the utiliza-
tion of sugar in the body, and on theoretical grounds he believed its effect
should relieve the paradox by which a slave of the drug habit requires
larger and larger doses of what is essentially a poison. He hoped that
through the insulin he might free the victim of dependence on morphine.

It is well known that rapid depletion of sugar in the blood produces
profound reactions, so the physicians worked out the experiment with
animals. A procedure was established, and at length, after many tests,
he felt justified in trying it on the human derelicts.

Some of the men reacted to the insulin with convulsions, but most of
them broke into perspiration and lapsed into deep sleep. When they came
out of their seizure, or were awakened after a few hours of coma, their
conduct surprised the doctor. He noticed that the morbid fears and
anxieties which habitually oppress addicts had diminished. Odd notions
of persecution, jumpy nerves, and other psychotic symptoms were gone.

This unexpected outcome set Dr. Sakel to thinking. If insulin improved
the mental climate of the drug-crazed men, what would it do for the
frankly insane? He began to try the treatment on mental patients and
was encouraged by many evidences of beneficial results. But the medical
authorities of Berlin were for the most part suspicious of his work, and it
was not until he moved to Vienna that he found a really sympathetic
listener. This was Dr. Otto Potzl, director of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic
of the University of Vienna, who opened the way for Dr. Sakel to test
his treatment on every case of schizophrenia entering the clinic. Within a
few months the most amazing stories were coming out of Vienna.

673

674 MAN'S MIND

Any reported cure for schizophrenia was bound to attract attention and
stir up criticism, for this disease is widely regarded as the most distressing
mutilation of mentality that mankind has to bear. Perhaps that is because
it usually strikes when its subjects are in their teens or early twenties and
dooms so many young people to "a veritable living death, devoid of
emotional life as others savor it." Because of this seeming preference for
the young, the disease is also known as dementia praecox; but the more
modern and commonly used term is schizophrenia. The condition is a form
of chronic brain storm in which the victim manifests a split personality,
is often dominated by imaginary voices and other hallucinations, and is
sometimes addicted to violences of the most offensive kind. . . .

The treatments in Vienna began in May, 1933, and soon Dr. Sakel had
records of fifty cases that had been referred to the clinic. Ordinarily, after
classification, these patients would have been transferred to state hospitals
for the usual forms of psychotherapy, but under the new arrangement
each was subjected to insulin treatment. In some cases metrazol also was
administered. Injections were given daily, or on alternate days, for periods
of from four to eight weeks. The treatment failed in six patients, and they
were eventually sent to state hospitals for further attention. But forty-four
of the fifty were so markedly benefited that they returned to their homes
and resumed their previous occupations.

The restoration of reason was a gradual process. For example, there was
a young woman whose hallucinations took the form of letters, figures, and
other symbols on her upper arm which her intended husband had tattooed
from a distance. After sixteen days of insulin treatment, she said, "I believe
my sight is getting poor, for I don't see the marks on my arms." Some
hours later she saw them again. But during the next bout with insulin they
disappeared and were absent for a longer time. And so it was with each
repetition of the treatment, until finally the imaginary markings dropped
out of her consciousness altogether. . . .

Theories have been proposed to explain why insulin exerts a reforming
influence on the sick brain, but there is no agreement among the experts.
The mechanism of schizophrenia is a mystery, and it is not strange if the
mechanism of its relief is equally hidden. Admitting that the treatment
is purely empirical, many psychiatrists nevertheless have found it a godsend
in thousands of cases that were drifting into stark madness — men and
women who a few years ago were confined to institutions and who today
are going about "clothed and in their right mind" thanks to the powerful
chemisms invoked by the hormone. * . .

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 675

As Sakel was working out his technique and demonstrating its useful-
ness in Austria, a psychiatrist in near-by Hungary was prospecting the
possibilities of shock treatment from another point of view. This was Dr.
Ladislaus von Meduna of the Royal Hungarian State Institute for the
Insane. Dr. Meduna had been studying brain anatomy and was impressed
with what seemed to him a structural difference between schizophrenics
and epileptics.

He listed other contrasts also. There was an observation that schizo-
phrenia and epilepsy rarely occur in the same individual. It has also been
said that victims of schizophrenia are usually persons of thin bodies and
angular features, whereas epileptics generally are stocky, broad, and
heavily built. Of course there are exceptions, "nature does not recognize
our rigid categories," but in general schizophrenics tend to be thin and
epileptics to be thick. Finally, it had been noticed among a small group
that, when schizophrenics did have epilepsy, their insanity abated follow-
ing an epileptic convulsion.

All these items added up to one conclusion in Meduna's mind: the
idea that schizophrenia and epilepsy were incompatible conditions.

If so, he reasoned, why not make use of this antagonism? If schizo-
phrenics are improved by convulsions, and if they are not naturally afflicted
with epilepsy, let us use artifical means to induce a seizure and thus oppose
insanity with its natural antagonist.

It is well known that certain drugs will bring on convulsions. Dr.
Meduna chose camphor for his early experiments. In later tests metrazol
(cardiazol) was tried, and today it is so generally preferred by those who
espouse the Meduna procedure that the treatment is widely known as
metrazol therapy.

The metrazol is injected into a vein, and a violent convulsion follows
within a few seconds. The seizure lasts thirty to eighty seconds, with alter-
nate jerks, wri things, and spasms of rigidity, after which the patient drops
into profound sleep which lasts for several minutes. Metrazol treatment
is more rapid than insulin treatment. In 1939 Drs. Meduna and Emerick
Friedman reviewed 2937 cases tnat had been treated with metrazol and
reported 737 full remissions—a little better than 25 per cent.

Although it was Meduna's guiding idea that the epileptic condition
selectively opposes schizophrenia, many physicians report that metrazol
shock is more successful against other forms of insanity — particularly
chronic states of melancholia and of mania — whereas insulin shock is
more often successful against schizophrenia. However, there have been

676 MAN'S MIND

some dramatic cases of schizophrenics who had repeatedly failed to
improve under insulin treatment, on whom metrazol was tried with
encouraging results. The opposite has also been observed: cases that did
not yield to metrazol have later been treated successfully with insulin. . . .

Apparently something very drastic goes on, for the violence of metra-
zol shock has resulted in not a few cases of dislocated jaws, broken legs,
fractured vertebrae, and other injuries which occur in the split second of
a severe jerk or contortion. Because of this and other suspected injuries,
and the terror which repetition of the treatment invokes in its subjects,
many psychiatrists refuse to make use of metrazol. Some have frankly
called it "a perfectly dreadful drug." Others hail it as a blessing. . . .

At the same time, the hazards are real and are not to be ignored, and
during 1941 considerable attention was being given a rare drug used to
soften the shock. This drug is curare, a vegetable extract first used by
South American Indians to poison arrow tips. Claude Bernard studied
the action of curare many decades ago, and proved that it is harmless when
administered by mouth. Since then various applications have been tried.
In experiments at the Lincoln State Hospital in 1940, Dr. Bennett demon-
strated that when curare was given a few minutes in advance of the
metrazol injection, the violence of the convulsion was moderated,
and the percentage of fractured bones was considerably reduced. Indeed,
he reports that curarization has eliminated "all traumatic hazards." . . .

More recently a third mechanism has been put to use against brain
storms. This is the electroshock method developed by Drs. Ugo Cerletti
and L. Bini at the Clinic for Nervous and Mental Diseases in Rome.
They completed preliminary experiments with dogs in 1938, and began
to try the electricity on a few psychotic patients. Medical men in France,
Germany, and England took up the method, and late in 1939 reports
of successful treatments appeared in the British medical press. About this
time tests began to be made in the United States.

To receive electroshock the patient lies on a table, two pads of rubber
faced with interwoven strips of thin copper are adjusted to his temples,
and a minute current of electricity ranging in force from 70 to 100 volts
is passed through his head for a fraction of a second. There follow periods
of unconsciousness, spasm, severe convulsion, and deep coma during
which the patient may look extremely blue. On awakening there is a twi-
light period of semiconsciousness, and when the patient finally "comes
out of it" he is generally unable to recall any memory of the experi-
ence. . . .

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 677

Manic depressive insanity, which only rarely yields to insulin, shows a
fair rate of remission under electric shock — as it does also under metrazol
shock. This form of brain storm is one of mood. In its manic phase the
patient goes through a period of weeks, months, and it may be years, in
a state of high elation and exaggerated excitement, only to fall into the
alternate mood of depression. . . .

The most pronounced field of usefulness for electroshock, however, is
that of the depressions that afflict the mind in late middle age. Such, at
least, is the experience of the Pennsylvania Hospital. "These depressions,"
said Dr. E. A. Strecker, "formerly lasting one or more years, and sadly
marked by mental agony, self-blame, great motor agitations, suicidal
trends, often with gross somatic delusions such as the conviction which
one patient had that his stomach was sealed up, are today being 'cured*
in from 50 to 60 per cent of the cases treated — or at least promptly relieved
of the distressing symptoms."

A still newer treatment for mental diseases makes use of refrigeration.
It was first announced in the spring of 1941 by Drs. John H. Talbott and
Kenneth J. Tillotson of Boston. They reported on ten schizophrenics who
had failed to benefit from insulin, metrazol, and other agencies. The
patients were given a light anesthetic to make them less sensitive to cold,
were wrapped in rubberized blankets through which a fluid refrigerant
circulated, and by these means their temperature was reduced below the
normal 98.6° F. Each treatment lasted from twenty-four to seventy-two
hours, during which internal body temperatures were maintained between
90 and 80°, with even lower readings reached for brief intervals. One
patient, a young woman who had not spoken to anyone for two years,
talked fluently and logically when her temperature was around 89° but
lapsed into confused speech when the thermometer rose to 93°. After her
third session with refrigeration, the woman's mental condition remained
more nearly lucid with only an occasional schizophrenic phase. Of the ten
patients treated, satisfactory results are reported of four. . . .

Surgery has also been resorted to as a means of relieving insanity, and
perhaps it can be called the most drastic of all the measures so far devised.
The operation is called prefrontal leucotomy, meaning the cutting of white
matter in the lobes of the brain which underlie the forehead. The knife
severs the connection between these frontal cells, of the cerebral cortex,
and the cells of the thalamus, the ancient inner brain which tops the
spinal column.

The surgical procedure was introduced in 1935 by Dr. Egas Moniz of
Portugal. Drs. Walter Freeman and James W. Watts of the George Wash-
ington University School of Medicine were the first to use it in the United

678 MAN'S MIND

States. They modified the operation and invented a new form of knife
and other instruments which have proved useful. Drs. Freeman and
Watts restricted their early service to cases of involutional melancholia
and other dementias associated with middle age.

But at the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia it was
decided to try the surgery on schizophrenics as a last resort. Candidates
for the operation were selected by Dr. E. A. Strecker from a group of
apparently hopeless cases. All had been malignantly insane for more than
five years, all were completely possessed by delusions and haunted by
hallucinations of the most distressing kind, stormy, violent, habitual. Four
women and one man were chosen; the youngest twenty-five, the oldest
thirty-nine. The operations were performed by Dr. Francis C. Grant.

"In prefrontal leucotomy recovery must not be expected," said the con-
servative Dr. Strecker in reporting these cases, and then he added that
"all five patients improved." However, comparison of their behavior
before the operation with their behavior since shows that the improvement
has been very substantial, and in one instance can be described as revolu-
tionary. This was a woman who was plagued with voices, voices so tor-
turing in their persistence that she begged the doctor to puncture her ear
drums so that she could not hear the eternal taunts and threatenings.
Driven by these hallucinations she was unmanageable, given to atrocious
conduct, regarded as hopeless. She underwent the operation six years ago,
and the transformation was like a miracle. Today that woman is a
matron of charm, she has married, has even had a baby (though against the
doctor's advice), and is a completely reoriented, socially attractive, appar-
ently normal personality. It is doubtful if in all the annals of mental
disorder a more complete or more dramatic "improvement" can be found.

Whatever the agency used — whether it be surgery, refrigeration, elec-
tricity, metrazol, insulin, or some other drug — these forms of treatment
are severe. The patient's body, particularly his nervous system, receives
a stunning blow which jolts it out of its accustomed routine. Quite apart
from the hazards of bone fracture and dislocation referred to earlier, there
is some evidence that brain cells are damaged and even destroyed by the
shocks. Of course the surgery is a frank cutting, which means destruction
of cells. In some instances of shock therapy, it is reported that patients
have continued to have convulsions after termination of the treatment,
and thus the effect has apparently been to add epilepsy to the prior dis-
order. Certain tests have shown, moreover, that the electrical pulsations
of the brain acquire a disordered pattern following some of these treat-

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 679

ments. In view of these and related facts, some psychiatrists refuse to make
use of any of the radical procedures described in this chapter. The present
discussion would be incomplete if it did not include the point of view of
these sceptics, among whom are eminent leaders of the profession in the
United States,

Recently Dr. Stanley Cobb, psychiatrist in chief at the Massachusetts
General Hospital, reviewed the results of various experiments with shock
therapies. He described how several investigators had used animals, and
following the treatments had examined the brains. Widespread degenera-
tion of the ganglion cells of the brain had occurred. "Such evidence makes
me believe," said Dr. Cobb, "that the therapeutic effect of insulin and
metrazol may be due to the destruction of great numbers of nerve cells in
the cerebral cortex. This destruction is irreparable. The therapy may be
justified in cases of schizophrenia if experience proves that treatment
results in permanent improvement, but the physician recommending these
radical measures should do so only with his eyes open to the fact that he
may be removing symptoms by practically destroying the most highly
organized part of the brain."

. . . The new methods may be experimental, they may need further
testing, they may require better adjustment to psychotherapeutic tech-
niques, but they have rendered untenable the old concept of insanity as a
mysterious psychological ill that yields only to psychological treatment.
As Dr. Foster Kennedy has said, "We shall not again be content to*
minister to a mind diseased by philosophy and words."

Philosophy and words, with which the medieval priest exorcised the
spirits of demoniac possession, have departed also from the treatment of
epilepsy. This "sacred disease" is not insanity, and yet it involves sporadic
brain storms of a most distressing character, and during the storm, or
"seizure" as it is still euphuistically called, the epileptic is certainly out of
his mind. . . .

A demonstration of the educability of the brain after years of thralldom
to epilepsy was reported to the 1940 meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association. The case was that of a young man whose illness dated from
childhood. At the age of four he had suffered a stunning fall on the head.
He seemed to recover, but two years later, in the spring of his first year
at school, he suddenly went into an epileptic convulsion, the first of a
terrifying series. Sometimes he had as many as eighteen in a single day.
It was impossible, thereafter, to attend school, or even to be taught at
home, because of the frequency and violence of his convulsions. This had

680 MAN'S MIND

been going. on for seventeen years when, in October, 1939, the parents
brought their son to Dr. Howard D. Fabing in Cincinnati.

The neurologist found it difficult to get much conversation from this
twenty-three-year-old boy, who at home had sat awkwardly, crumpling
tinfoil, winding and unwinding a ball of twine, and staring vacantly out
of the window

Fortunately, a new remedy was available. It had been developed by two
Boston neurologists, Drs. H. H. Merritt and Tracy J. Putnam, who set
out to find a drug that would prevent epileptic seizures. Their discovery
is an impressive example of planned research in which a specific result
was found, not by accident, but by carefully reasoned design. They used
cats as their experimental animals and by means of electrical shock threw
the cats into convulsions. They determined the threshold voltage, the
electrical load that would just suffice to bring on this artificial epilepsy, and
then dosed the animals with drugs to see which would raise the thresh-
old and make it more difficult to induce the fit. Some two hundred chemi-
cals were tested, and the one that came out with highest honors was a
white powder, a synthetic compound of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
oxygen, and sodium. It has been named dilantin. Since Merritt and
Putnam first announced their results in 1937, dilantin has been adminis-
tered to thousands of epileptics. It has not proved to be a universal medica-
ment, for there are definite pharmacological limitations, and some per-
rons react unfavorably to its effects. But clinical reports show that more
tffim 70 per cent of the epileptics on whom it has been tried have found
dilantin a veritable staff of consciousness. In case after case it has been
demonstrated that so long as the patient takes his daily capsules he remains
free of seizures.

But the overgrown boy in Cincinnati was an exceptional case, and it was
recognized that his long-established chronic condition would provide a
supreme test. Dilantin was administered, repeated the next day, again on
the next. Then — it seemed unbelievable! — for the first time in seventeen
years he spent an entire day without a convulsion.

What about mental performance? It was a question whether a brain
that had lain fallow so many years could be educated. The neurologist
called in as collaborator the psychologist Dr. Doris Twitchell-Allen. She
decided to take the young man into her home as a member of her family,
and during the next four months his course was under twenty-four-hour
daily observation and guidance. An important element of this program
was the boy's tutoring by Mrs. Richard B. Freeman, beginning with
elementary reading and arithmetic.

The result was amazing. Freed by dilantin from epileptic seizures, the

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 681

pupil applied himself and learned rapidly. In a matter of weeks he had
finished the first reader. He quickly caught on in mathematics, memorized
the multiplication tables. Gradudlly he overcame some of his fears of phys-
ical effort and began to play ball, badminton, and croquet.

When Drs. Fabing and Twitchell-Allen made their first report in May,
1940, the young man had been under the combined influence of daily
dilantin and psychological guidance for six months, and within that
period his mental age had advanced from six years to ten years. Then
followed six months at the Devereux Tutoring Schools in Berwyn, Penn-
sylvania. At the end of this period the student had progressed to the
point where, though academically still a grade pupil, he could undertake
more independent living. Through an arrangement with the College of
Education of the University of Cincinnati he was tutored at the university
by a graduate student. This experience, as well as association with other
students during daily meals at the college cafeteria, contributed in innu-
merable ways to his development. At last accounts, fortified by his daily
dose, the young man was still free of seizures, still progressing in his
studies — a remarkable demonstration of the close dependence of perform-
ance on chemical foundations.

Fundamental to the modern study of epilepsy is the machine for record-
ing brain waves — the electroencephalograph, as it is learnedly called by the
technicians. According to Dr. W. G. Lenifox and his associates at the
Harvard Medical School, the apparatus reveals that the number of persons
who carry a constitutional predisposition to epilepsy or allied disorders
is twenty times as great as the number actually subject to seizures.

This means that in addition to the 500,000 in the United States who have
frank epilepsy, there is "a veritable sea of persons," estimated at some
10,000,000, who have a disturbance in the electrical pulsations of their
nervous systems. Under ordinary conditions their internal environment
remains in equilibrium. But given extraordinary conditions — a shattering
emotional shock, a physical injury to the brain, or severe dysfunction of
some gland or other organ affecting the brain — and these potentials may
become actuals. Their disordered brain waves may break out of control
and manifest themselves in open seizures or in some allied condition. The
records indicate, however, that only about one person in twenty who
undergo such accidents develops epilepsy.

The recording machine was invented by a German .psychiatrist, Dr.
Hans Berger. Earlier investigators had detected cerebral electricity, but
the currents were too weak for systematic study until Dr. Berger recog-

682 MAN'S MIND

nized in the radio vacuum tube an excellent means of magnifying these
impulses to appreciable values. He attached wires to electrodes placed
on opposite sides of a man's head, connected these to a powerful vacuum-
tube amplifier, magnified the impulses a million times, and caused the
brain currents to write their fluctuations on a moving tape. Berger noticed
that there were patterns characteristic of repose, wakefulness, and other
mental states. He tried his instrument on a group of epileptics and
observed that their waves during seizures were different from those
recorded at times when they were free of seizures — a finding that was
soon confirmed at other research centers.

One of these places at which epilepsy was being studied intensively was
the Boston City Hospital. Its special interest began in 1923 when a wealthy
New Yorker gave the Harvard Medical School a fund to support investi-
gation in this field. . . .

The Harvard Epilepsy Commission was established to receive and
administer this and other gifts. The commission has been the activator
of many research projects, particularly in the Boston City Hospital where
one of the world's principal clinics for the treatment of epilepsy now
operates. It was here that Drs. Merritt and Putnam discovered the use of
dilantin. And it is here that Dr. Lennox, Dr. and Mrs. F. A. Gibbs, and
others skilled in neurology, biochemistry, and biophysics are investigating
the nature of the flesh-and-blood conditions associated with epilepsy.

They are studying brain waves and charting the differences. Each
human being has his characteristic pattern, as individual as his hand-
writing, but in general there is a certain frequency which is fairly stand-
ard for normal persons in health. This normal frequency is around ten
per second for the large waves, known as alpha waves. Here is a typical
recording of a normal:

A/\Ai/tAA/V*Vi^^

In an epileptic, even in a period of well being, the waves are more
stormy, periodically becoming too high in voltage and either too fast or
too slow. With the onset of a seizure the pattern changes, and the nature
of the change depends on the kind of seizure that possesses the patient.
If trJfe attack is of the violent kind known as grand maly the waves
accelerate very rapidly, and at the height of the convulsion may swing
back and forth at the rate of twenty-five a second. Here is a characteristic
record of this kind made by a patient during a grand mal seizure:

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 685

^1^

If the epilepsy is of the milder transient type known as petit mal, in
which the victim becomes momentarily unconscious and shows only slight
if any convulsion, the waves usually are mixed, alternately fast and slow.
Here is a typical record made during a seizure of this kind, showing a
combination of alternate waves and spikes at the rate of about three a
second :

There is still a third kind. In this the patient does not experience a fit
but lapses into a state of amnesia during which he may perform many odd
and irrational acts of which he retains no memory. The Flemish painter
Vincent van Gogh was afflicted with this psychomotor type of epilepsy,
and during an attack cut off one of his ears and presented it to a woman
friend. The following was recorded from a patient during a psychomotor
attack, the waves measuring about six a second :

Disturbed rhythms of these and related kinds are found almost univer-
sally in epileptics, and are now regarded as symptoms of the disease —
though it must be added that a small proportion, about 10 per cent, of
apparently normal persons show abnormal waves. Studies made in mental
hospitals reveal that schizophrenics carry a higher-than-average incidence
of the disturbed patterns. Mrs. Pauline A. Davis, research associate in the
Harvard Medical School, reports recordings of 132 schizophrenic patients
in two New England hospitals, which showed abnormality in more than
half the cases. Most of the abnormalities resembled one or more of the
disturbed wave patterns of epileptics, suggesting a possible kinship between
epilepsy and schizophrenia. It appeared in these studies of schizophrenics
that those who carried abnormal brain waves were the ones who most often
flew into rages, bursts of uncontrolled behavior, or convulsions, whereas
those with normal brain waves tended to be quiet, tractable, and coopera-
tive.

Departures from the normal pattern have been named cerebral
dysrhythmia by Dr. Lennox, and they have proved to be exceedingly help-
ful in guiding the treatment of epileptic patients. . . .

684 MAN'S MIND

In 1937 Dr. Lennox was treating an afflicted boy whose dysrhythmia
evas unique, yet carried the characteristic marks of his type of epilepsy.
He thought it would be interesting to get a record of the brain waves of
the child's parents. They readily agreed, and the father's waves proved
to be of the slow kind, similar to those generated by his epileptic son.
There were two other children in the family, and it turned out that
neither of them had a normal pattern. Thus, in this family of five, only
the mother had normal brain waves. The father and three children carried
the epileptic pattern, though only one of them, the boy who was under
treatment, had shown convulsions or other symptoms of the disease.

Since then it has been the practice at the Boston City Hospital to request
a recording, not only of the patient applying for admission to the epileptic
clinic, but also of the parents, brothers, and sisters. The collected data
show that dysrhythmia is present in about 60 per cent of the close rela-
tives of the patients. In a group of seventy-four epileptics, it was found
that thirty were born of parents whose brains carried the telltale pattern in
both father and mother, thirty-nine had it in one parent, and only five
had parents whose waves were nomal.

On the basis of these studies the Boston workers are convinced that the
presence of hereditary dysrhythmia in the brain indicates a predisposition
to epilepsy or some allied disorder, and that marriage between persons
who carry grossly abnormal brain waves is eugenically undesirable. . . .

The waves reflect the electrical activity of the ten billion cells which
make up the cortical tissue of the brain. These cells may be likened to so
many batteries whose frequency and intensity of electrical discharge are
determined by relations between the chemicals which fill the cells and
those which circulate outside in the blood. Thus electrical activity depends
on the nature of the chemical mixture which is the brain and its circulat-
ing medium, and we arrive at the conclusion that epilepsy is an effect of
disordered body chemistry.

The researchers at the Boston City Hospital have been exploring this
disordered chemistry. They have found a difference in blood content, not
only between epileptics and nonepileptics, but also between the epileptic
in a grand mal seizure and in a petit mal seizure. The chief difference lies
in the carbon dioxide content of the blood. . . . Presumably, if we could
control the carbon dioxide of the blood we would iron out the electrical
dysrhythmia and, with its restoration to normal, relieve the epilepsy.

Schizophrenia also has its disturbed chemistry. One of the most compre-
hensive investigations is that which has been under way for several years

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES 685

at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts, where Dr. Roy G.
Hoskins and his associates have followed the records of three hundred
patients. They report that the schizophrenic person is quite as abnormal
in body as he is in mind.

His resting blood pressure is low, averaging around 100 to compare with
120 and higher for the normal person of equal age. His pulse is slow,
around 59 against 65 and faster for normals. His oxygen consumption is
only about 89 per cent of normal. Another striking difference shows in
his utilization of protein. The more protein the normal man eats, the
more fuel his body burns — but in the schizophrenic this is not so. Appar-
ently he does not get the normal stimulation from protein consumption.

Thus the schizophrenic body lives at a slower rate than the normal, the
heart pumps more slowly, the blood flows under reduced pressure, the
oxygen consumption is low. Dr. Hoskins calls attention to the fact that
the normal man's body slows its activities in just these same ways when he
is asleep, a circumstance which fits the picture of the schizophrenic as one
who lives in a dream.

"His dream differs from your dream and mine mostly in that on
awakening from sleep the dream is not dismissed," said Dr. Hoskins.
"The activities of the dream are carried on, rather than merely being
visualized. The schizophrenic state and the dream state are strikingly
similar in the free use of symbolism. Things do not mean what they
seem, but what they signify in the patient's own particular code. If the
reader will imagine that he has been awakened from a vivid dream,
but that as he went about his affairs the dream continued to occupy the
greater part of his attention, to dominate his thought and his activity, he
will have a sufficiently accurate picture of schizophrenia for the purposes
of this discussion. Largely it is a manifestation of more or less disguised
wishes or fears masquerading as accepted reality."

... Is this horrible disease, then, a thing of low oxygenation and other
purely chemical operations that might be corrected if only we knew their
controls? It would seem so. In the schizophrenic man there is a lack of
equilibrium, a faulty homeostasis, and the tortures of a mind diseased are
apparently a reflection of this fundamental disturbance of body chemistry.
Years ago Claude Bernard postulated his theory that the constancy of the
internal environment of circulating blood was the condition that freed
man from the incessant fluctuations of the outer world and gave the
brain a chance to develop its higher faculties. It is not strange if disrup-
tion of these chemical equilibria should disturb the brain and distort its
functioning.

1941

PART SIX

ATOMIC FISSION

Synopsis

The reader is urged to turn to page 175 and read the articles
entitled "Exploring the Atom/' by Sir James Jeans, "Touring the
Atomic World/' by Henry Schacht and "The Discovery of
Radium" by Eve Curie. They give basic facts necessary to an
understanding of the material in this section.

ON AUGUST 6, 1945, PRESIDENT TRUMAN ANNOUNCED THAT
an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima with an effect hitherto
unapproached in war. The announcement was a stunning surprise to all but a
tiny fraction of humanity. It described an achievement which the most op-
timistic of nuclear scientists would have hesitated to prophesy a decade before.
But the research and engineering which culminated in the bomb was no
new thing to science. Actually it had had its beginnings nearly half a century
before, when Henri Becquerel observed a fogging of a carefully wrapped
photographic plate which had accidentally been placed near a fragment of
that same substance, uranium, which was to play a dominant part in later
events. The development from a single observation, through numberless ex-
periments by men and women of many nationalities, to the final release of
nuclear energy in the bomb, is one of the most majestic edifices in science.
We know that little has been added to our theoretical knowledge of the
processes involved since as long ago as 1940. Even so, many will be astonished
to learn that one of the clearest and most succinct descriptions of the world
inside the atom was published even earlier. We reprinted that description in

ATOMIC FISSION 687

shorter form in an earlier edition of A TREASURY of SCIENCE. It is
"Exploring the Atom" by Sir James Jeans and you will find it in greatly ex-
panded structure on page 175. It is not complete. It makes no reference to some
constituents which contemporaiy scientists believe are components of the
atom. It does, however, discuss briefly the quantum theory and wave-
mechanics. The layman who finds this last section difficult to follow need not
be unduly disturbed. Only scientists can begin to understand the concepts
the phrases embody. And while they have been vitally necessary in the cal-
culations of nuclear physics, untrained readers can obtain a reasonably in-
telligible picture of atomic fission without them.

It is urged that you turn to Sir James's article before you read the selections
in this section. It gives you the basic facts which you must have to under-
stand what follows.

After you have read "Exploring the Atom/' examine the selection following
it, "Touring the Atomic World/' by Hemy Schacht, on page 200. Mr.
Schacht takes us into the laboratory of Professor E. O. Lawrence and describes
the giant cyclotron at the University of California. The selection was written
in 1940. Already scientists understood much about nuclear fission. Already
the atom was yielding something of its power. Here was much more than
the germ of work which years later was to end the greatest world war. The
Discovery of Radium by Eve Curie, on page 209, helps picture the drama of
research in the field.

The climax of the search was to come in 1945. ^ was *° ^e made public
in the form of a newspaper story, The War Department Release on the New
Mexico Test, July 16, 1945. The first selection in this section on "Atomic
Fission," it is of comparable importance to Galileo's Proof that the Earth
Moves. Almost certainly its appearance marked one of the great turning
points in mankind's history.

What went on in five years of feverish effort to make this release possible
is best described in a selection from the official report, "Atomic Energy for
Military Purposes," by Henry D. Smyth. One is struck forcibly by the logic
of developments. A theory of fission and a laboratory experiment on a minute
scale were to turn into the largest engineering project of which man has any
record, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and two billion dollars.
Faraday, when asked the value of his experiments in electricity, asked, "What
is the value of a newborn child?" The anecdote is here equally apt.

The Smyth report has become famous as the authoritative work on the sub-
ject. Much of the complete report is unintelligible to the layman. It has
been the editors' intention to omit as much technical data as possible while
preserving material which gives the reader a running account of the enormous
activity encompassed in the words "Manhattan Project."

What of the future? It holds much peril and hope, but not alone in the
science of war. The articles which follow give only an inkling of what the
atom can mean in peace and war, health and disease, leisure and work, as
well as knowledge of the processes of creation.

688 ATOMIC FISSION

It is fitting that the first of these articles should be by Dr. E. O. Lawrence.
His work on the cyclotron has won him the Nobel Prize. Around this cyclo-
tron have gathered a group of medical scientists who make experimental
use of the new substances it produces. Work hitherto impossible on chemical
change, on the checking of cancerous growths, on the curing of a variety of
diseases is taking place. Dr. Lawrence's report, "Nuclear Physics and Biology,"
is that of a physicist writing as an amateur in medicine and biology. It is
nonetheless an extraordinarily revealing and hopeful piece of work.

More journalistic, more incapable of immediate confirmation is the picture
of the future painted by the well-known popular science writer John /.
O'Neill in Almighty Atom. Mr. O'Neill's work is admittedly fantastic. Who
can say that a century hence it will not seem hopelessly conservative, hope-
lessly inadequate compared with reality?

Everything that Mr. O'Neill suggests presupposes peaceful use. The possi-
bility of such use has created more discussion than any other single topic
since Hiroshima. We are told that man must make terms with himself or be
destroyed. It is true, but the path is not yet clear. Certainly wishful thinking
is not the answer. What the problems are and how we can move to meet
them on a practical level now, are described by Professor Jacob Viner in 'The
Implication of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations." Professor
Viner's contribution is realistic, perhaps too realistic for the comfort of many.
But the facts he brings to light can be dismissed no more than the fact of
the energy within the nucleus.

Science has spoken, in tones more deafening than those of all the dicta-
tors who ever lived. Would it have been better if the voice had never been
lifted? Surely no one with even the faintest knowledge of the history of
science will doubt not only the power but also the ultimate beneficence of
increasing knowledge. Dr. /. R. Oppenheimer is the man who was in charge
of the actual creation of the atomic weapon. His article on the subject is a
reaffirmation of all this book's contents. Despite the weapons it makes pos-
sible, despite its use by men of ill will, "knowledge is a good in itself, knowl-
edge and such power as must come with it." And with that statement, Dr.
Oppenheimer presents a passionate and beautifully phrased warning — a warn-
ing which civilized man cannot afford to ignore.

War Department Release on New Mexico Test,

July 16, 1945

MANKIND'S SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION TO A NEW AGE,
the Atomic Age, was ushered in July 16, 1945, before the eyes of a
tense group of renowned scientists and military men gathered in the desert-
lands of New Mexico to witness the first end results of their $2,000,000,000
effort. Here in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base 120 miles
southeast of Albuquerque the first man-made atomic explosion, the out-
standing achievement of nuclear science, was achieved at 5:30 A.M. of that
day. Darkening heavens, pouring forth rain and lightning immediately
up to the zero hour, heightened the drama.

Mounted on a steel tower, a revolutionary weapon destined to change
war as we know it, or which may even be the instrumentality to end all
wars, was set off with an impact which signalized man's entrance into
a new physical world. Success was greater than the most ambitious
estimates. A small amount of matter, the product of a chain of huge
specially constructed industrial plants, was made to release the energy
of the universe locked up within the atom from the beginning of time.
A fabulous achievement had been reached. Speculative theory, barely
established in pre-war laboratories, had been projected into practicality.

This phase of the atomic bomb project, which is headed by Major
General Leslie R. Groves, was under the direction of Dr. J. R. Oppen-
heimer, theoretical physicist of the University of California. He is to
be credited with achieving the implementation of atomic energy for
military purposes.

Tension before the actual detonation was at a tremendous pitch. Fail-
ure was an ever-present possibility. Too great a success envisioned by
some of those present, might have meant an uncontrollable, unusable
weapon.

Final assembly of the atomic bomb began on the night of July 12 in
an old ranch house. As various component assemblies arrived from distant
points, tension among the scientists rose lo an increasing pitch. Coolest
of all was the man charged with the actual assembly of the vital core,
Dr. R. F. Bacher, in normal times a professor at Cornell University.

The entire cost of the project, representing the erection of whole cities
and radically new plants spread over many miles of countryside, plus

689

690 ATOMIC FISSION

unprecedented experimentation, was represented in the pilot bomb and
its parts. Here was the focal point of the venture. No other country
in the world had been capable of such an outlay in brains and technical
effort.

The full significance of these closing moments before the final factual
test was not lost on these men of science. They fully knew their position
as pioneers into another age. They also knew that one false move would
blast them and their entire effort into eternity. Before the assembly started
a receipt for the vital matter was signed by Brigadier General Thomas F.
Farrell, General Groves's deputy. This signalized the formal transfer of
the irreplaceable material from the scientists to the Army.

During final preliminary assembly, a bad few minutes developed when
the assembly of an important section of the bomb was delayed. The
entire unit was machine-tooled to the finest measurement. The insertion
was partially completed when it apparently wedged tightly and would
go no farther. Dr. Bacher, however, was undismayed and reassured the
group that time would solve the problem. In three minutes' time, Dr.
Bacher's statement was verified and basic assembly was completed with-
out further incident.

Specialty teams, comprised of the top men on specific phases of
science, all of which were bound up in the whole, took over their special-
ized parts of the assembly. In each group was centralized months and
even years of channelized endeavor.

On Saturday, July 14, the unit which was to determine the success or
failure of the entire project was elevated to the top of the steel tower.
All that day and the next, the job of preparation went on. In addition
to the apparatus necessary to cause the detonation, complete instrumenta-
tion to determine the pulse beat and all reactions of the bomb was rigged
on the tower.

The ominous weather which had dogged the assembly of the bomb
had a very sobering affect on the assembled experts whose work was
accomplished amid lightning flashes and peals of thunder. The weather,
unusual and upsetting, blocked out aerial observation of the test. It even
held up the actual explosion scheduled at 4:00 A.M. for an hour and a half.
For many months the approximate date and time had been set and had
been one of the high-level secrets of the best kept secret of the entire war.
Nearest observation point was set up 10,000 yards south of the tower
where in a timber and earth shelter the controls for the test were located.
At a point 17,000 yards from the tower at a point which would give the
best observation the key figures in the atomic bomb project took their
posts. These included General Groves, Eh-. Vannevar Bush, head of the

NEW MEXICO TEST 691

Office of Scientific Research and Development and Dr. James B. Conanf,
president of Harvard University.

Actual detonation was in charge of Dr. K. T. Bainbridge of Massa<
chusetts Institute of Technology. He and Lieutenant Bush, in charge of
the Military Police Detachment, were the last men to inspect the tower
with its cosmic bomb.

At three o'clock in the morning the party moved forward to the
control station. General Groves and Dr. Oppenheim consulted with the
weathermen. The decision was made to go ahead with the test despite
the lack of assurance of favorable weather. The time was set for 5:30 A.M.

General Groves rejoined Dr. Conant and Dr. Bush, and just before
the test time they joined the many scientists gathered at the base camp.
Here all present were ordered to lie on the ground, face downward, heads
away from the blast direction.

Tension reached a tremendous pitch in the control room as the deadline
approached. The several observation points in the area were tied in to
the control room by radio and with twenty minutes to go, Dr. S. K,
Allison of Chicago University took over the radio net and made periodic
time announcements.

The time signals, "minus 20 minutes, minus fifteen minutes," and on
and on increased the tension to the breaking point as the group in the
control room which included Dr. Oppenheimer and General Farrell held
their breaths, all praying with the intensity of the moment which will
live forever with each man who was there. At "minus 45 seconds," robot
mechanism took over and from that point on the whole great complicated
mass of intricate mechanism was in operation without human control*
Stationed at a reserve switch, however, was a soldier scientist ready to
attempt to stop the explosion should the order be issued. The order
never came.

At the appointed time there was a blinding flash lighting up the whole
area brighter than the brightest daylight. A mountain range three miles
from the observation point stood out in bold relief. Then came a tre-
mendous sustained roar and a heavy pressure wave which knocked down
two men outside the control center. Immediately thereafter, a huge multi-
colored surging cloud boiled to an altitude of over 40,000 feet. Clouds in
its path disappeared. Soon the shifting substratosphere winds dispersed the
now gray mass.

The test was over, the project a success.

The steel tower had been entirely vaporized, Where the tower had
stood, there was a huge sloping crater. Dazed but relieved at the success
of their tests, the scientists promptly marshaled their forces to estimate

692 ATOMIC FISSION

the strength of America's new weapon. To examine the nature of the
crater, specially equipped tanks were wheeled into the area, one of which
carried Dr. Enrico Fermi, noted nuclear scientist. Answer to their find-
ings rests in the destruction effected in Japan today in the first military
use of the atomic bomb.

Had it not been for the desolated area where the test was held and for
the co-operation of the press in the area, it is certain that the test itself
would have attracted far-reaching attention. As it was, many people in
that area are still discussing the effect of the smash. A significant aspect,
recorded by the press, was the experience of a blind girl near Albuquerque
many miles from the scene, who, when the flash of the test lighted the
sky before the explosion could be heard, exclaimed, "What was that?"

Interviews of General Groves and General Farrell give the following
on-the-scene versions of the test. General Groves said: "My impressions
of the night's high points follow: After about an hour's sleep I got up
at oioo and from that time on until about five I was with Dr. Oppenheimer
constantly. Naturally he was tense, although his mind was working at
its usual extraordinary efficiency. I attempted to shield him from the
evident concern shown by many of his assistants who were disturbed by
the uncertain weather conditions. By 0330 we decided that we could
probably fire at 0530. By 0400 the rain had stopped but the sky was
heavily overcast. Our decision became firmer as time went on.

"During most of these hours the two of us journeyed from the control
house out into the darkness to look at the stars and to assure each other
that the one or two visible stars were becoming brighter. At 0510 I left
Dr. Oppenheimer and returned to the main observation point which was
17,000 yards from the point of explosion. In accordance with our orders
I found all personnel not otherwise occupied massed on a bit of high
ground.

"Two minutes before the scheduled firing time, all persons lay face
down with their feet pointing towards the explosion. As the remaining
time was called from the loud speaker from the io,ooo-yard control
station there was complete awesome silence. Dr. Conant said he had
never imagined seconds could be so long. Most of the individuals in
accordance with orders shielded their eyes in one way or another.

"First came the burst of light of a brilliance beyond any comparison.
We all rolled over and looked through dark glasses at the ball of fire.
About forty seconds later came the shock wave followed by the sound,
neither of which seemed startling after our complete astonishment at the
extraordinary lighting intensity.

"A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward

NEW MEXICO TEST 693

with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere in about five
minutes.

"Two supplementary explosions of minor effect other than the light-
ing occurred in the cloud shortly after the main explosion.

"The cloud traveled to a great height first in the form of a ball,
then mushroomed, then changed into a long trailing chimney-shaped
column and finally was sent in several directions by the variable winds
at the different elevations.

"Dr. Conant reached over and we shook hands in mutual congratula-
tions. Dr. Bush, who was on the other side of me, did likewise. The feeling
of the entire assembly, even the uninitiated, was of profound awe. Drs.
Conant and Bush and myself were struck by an even stronger feeling
that the faith of those who had been responsible for the initiation and
the carrying on of this Herculean project had been justified."

General FarrelPs impressions are: "The scene inside the shelter was
dramatic beyond words. In and around the shelter were some twenty
odd people concerned with last-minute arrangements. Included were Dr.
Oppenheimer, the director who had borne the great scientific burden of
developing the weapon from the raw materials made in Tennessee and
Washington, and a dozen of his key assistants, Dr. Kistiakowsky, Dr.
Bainbridge, who supervised all the detailed arrangements for the test;
the weather expert, and several others. Besides those, there were a handful
of soldiers, two or three army officers and one naval officer. The shelter
was filled with a great variety of instruments and radios.

"For some hectic two hours preceding the blast, General Groves stayed
with the director. Twenty minutes before the zero hour, General Groves
left for his station at the base camp, first because it provided a better
observation point and second, because of our rule that he and I must
not be together in situations where there is an element of danger which
existed at both points.

"Just after General Groves left, announcements began to be broadcast
of the interval remaining before the blast to the other groups participating
in and observing the test. As the time interval grew smaller and changed
from minutes to seconds, the tension increased by leaps and bounds.
Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that
they thought was about to happen. The scientists felt that their figuring
must be right and that the bomb had to go off but there was in every-
one's mind a strong measure of doubt.

"We were reaching into the unknown and we did not know what
might come of it. It can safely be said that most of those present were
praying — and praying harder than they had ever prayed before. If the

694 ATOMIC FISSfON

shot were successful, it was a justification of the several years of intensive
effort of tens of thousands of people — statesmen, scientists, engineers, manu-
facturers, soldiers, and many others in every walk of life.

"In that brief instant in the remote New Mexico desert, the tremendous
effort of the brains and brawn of all these people came suddenly and
startlingly to the fullest fruition. Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested
a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely
breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds,
he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted 'Now!'
and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter
by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an
expression of tremendous relief. Several of the observers standing back
of the shelter to watch the lighting effects were knocked flat by the blast.

"The tension in the room let up and all started congratulating each
other. Everyone sensed 'This is it!'. No matter what might happen now
all knew that the impossible scientific job had been done. Atomic
fission would no longer be hidden in the cloisters of the theoretical
physicists' dreams. It was almost full grown at birth. It was a great
new force to be used for good or for evil. There was a feeling in that
shelter that those concerned with its nativity should dedicate their lives
to the mission that it would always be used for good and never for evil.

"Dr. Kistiakowsky threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and em-
braced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All the
pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and all seemed to
sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic
expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists. All seemed to feel
that they had been present at the birth of a new age — The Age of Atomic
Energy — and felt their profound responsibility to help in guiding into
right channels the tremendous forces which had been unlocked for the
first time in history.

"As to the present war, there was a feeling that no matter what else
might happen, we now had the means to insure its speedy conclusion
and save thousands of American lives. As to the future, there had been
brought into being something big and something new that would prove
to be immeasurably more important than the discovery of electricity or
any of the other great discoveries which have so affected our existence.

"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful,
stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tre-
mendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared
description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the
intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple,

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 695

violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the
nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described
but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets
dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds
after, the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the
people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sus-
tained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that
we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces here-
tofore reserved to the Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the
job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and
psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized."

Atomic Energy for Military Purposes

HENRY D. SMYTH

From Atomic Energy for Military Purposes

FROM CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

THE CONSERVATION OF MASS AND OF ENERGY

npHERE ARE TWO PRINCIPLES THAT HAVE BEEN
JL cornerstones of the structure of modern science. The first — that matter
can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form — was enunci-
ated in the eighteenth century and is familiar to every student of
chemistry; it has led to the principle known as the law of conservation
of mass. The second — that energy can be neither created nor destroyed
but only altered in form — emerged in the nineteenth century and has ever
since been the plague of inventors of perpetual-motion machines; it is
known as the law of conservation of energy.

These two principles have constantly guided and disciplined the develop-
ment and application of science. For all practical purposes they were unal-

696 ATOMIC FISSION

tered and separate until some five years ago. For most practical purposes
they still are so, but it is now known that they are, in fact, two phases of a
single principle for we have discovered that energy may sometimes be con-
verted into matter and matter into energy. Specifically, such a conversion is
observed in the phenomenon of nuclear fission of uranium, a process in
which atomic nuclei split into fragments with the release of an enormous
amount of energy. The military use of this energy has been the object
of the research and production projects described in this report

THE EQUIVALENCE OF MASS AND ENERGY

One conclusion that appeared rather early in the development of the
theory of relativity was that the inertial mass of a moving body increased
as its speed increased. This implied an equivalence between an increase in
energy of motion of a body, that is, its kinetic energy, and an increase in its
mass. To most practical physicists and engineers this appeared a mathe-
matical fiction of no practical importance. Even Einstein could hardly
have foreseen the present applications, but as early as 1905 he did clearly
state that mass and energy were equivalent and suggested that proof
of this equivalence might be found by the study of radioactive substances.
He concluded that the amount of energy, E, equivalent to a mass, m, was
given by the equation

E = me2

where c is the velocity of light. If this is stated in actual numbers, its
startling character is apparent. It shows that one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of
matter, if converted entirely into energy, would give 25 billion kilowatt
hours of energy. This is equal to the energy that would be generated by
the total electric power industry in the United States (as of 1939) running
for approximately two months. Compare this fantastic figure with the
8.5 kilowatt hours of heat energy which may be produced by burning
an equal amount of coal.

The extreme size of this conversion figure was interesting in several
respects. In the first place, it explained why the equivalence of mass and
energy was never observed in ordinary chemical combustion. We now
believe that the heat given off in such a combustion has mass associated
with it, but this mass is so small that it cannot be detected by the most
sensitive balances available. ... In the second place, it was made clear that
no appreciable quantities of matter were being converted into energy
in any familiar terrestrial processes, since no such large sources of energy

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 697

were known. Further, the possibility of initiating or controlling such a
conversion in any practical way seemed very remote. Finally, the very size
of the conversion factor opened a magnificent field of speculation to
philosophers, physicists, engineers, and comic-strip artists. For twenty-five
years such speculation was unsupported by direct experimental evidence,
but beginning about 1930 such evidence began to appear in rapidly in-
creasing quantity. . . ,

NUCLEAR BINDING ENERGIES

It is a general principle of physics that work must be done on a stable
system to break it up. Thus, if an assemblage of neutrons and protons is
stable, energy must be supplied to separate its constituent particles. If
energy and mass are really equivalent, then the total mass of a stable
nucleus should be less than the total mass of the separate protons and
neutrons that go to make it up. This mass difference, then, should be
equivalent to the energy required to disrupt the nucleus completely,
which is called the binding energy. Remember that the masses of al!
nuclei were "approximately" whole numbers. It is the small differences
from whole numbers that are significant.

Consider the alpha particle as an example. It is stable; since its mass
number is four and its atomic number two it consists of two protons and
two neutrons. The mass of a proton is 1.00758 and that of a neutron is
1.00893, so that the total mass of the separate components of the helium
nucleus is

2X1 .00758 +2X1 .00893 = 4-°3302

whereas the mass of the helium nucleus itself is 4.00280. Neglecting the
last two decimal places we have 4.033 and 4.003, a difference of 0.030 mass
units. This, then, represents the "binding energy" of the protons and
neutrons in the helium nucleus. It looks small, but recalling Einstein's
equation, E = mc2, we remember that a small amount of mass is equiva-
lent to a large amount of energy. Actually 03030 mass units is equal to
4.5 X io~5 ergs per nucleus or 2.7 X io19 ergs per gram molecule of helium.
In units more familiar to the engineer or chemist, this means that to
break up the nuclei of all the helium atoms in a gram of helium would
require 1.62 Xio11 gram calories or 190,000 kilowatt hours of energy.
Conversely, if free protons and neutrons could be assembled into helium
nuclei, this energy would be released.

Evidently it is worth exploring the possibility of getting energy by com-
bining protons and neutrons or by transmuting one kind of nucleus into
another. . . ,

698 ATOMIC FISSION

THE NEED OF A CHAIN REACTION

Our common sources of power, other than sunlight and waterpower,
are chemical reactions — usually the combustion of coal or oil. They
release energy as the result of rearrangements of the outer electronic struc-
tures of the atoms, the same kind of process that supplies energy to our
bodies. Combustion is always self -propagating; thus lighting a fire with a
match releases enough heat to ignite the neighboring fuel, which releases
more heat which ignites more fuel, and so on. In the nuclear reactions we
have described this is not generally true; neither the energy released nor the
new particles formed are sufficient to maintain the reaction. But we can
imagine nuclear reactions emitting particles of the same sort that initiate
them and in sufficient numbers to propagate the reaction in neighboring
nuclei. Such a self-propagating reaction is called a "chain reaction" and
such conditions must be achieved if the energy of the nuclear reactions
With which we are concerned is to be put to large-scale use.

PERIOD OF SPECULATION

Although there were no atomic power plants built in the thirties,
there were plenty of discoveries in nuclear physics and plenty of specu-
lation. A theory was advanced by H. Bethe to explain the heat of the sun
by a cycle of nuclear changes involving carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and
oxygen, and leading eventually to the formation of helium. This theory
is now generally accepted. The discovery of a few (n,2n) nuclear reactions
(i.e., neutron-produced and neutron-producing reactions) suggested that
a self-multiplying chain reaction might be initiated under the right con-
ditions. There was much talk of atomic power and some talk of atomic
bombs. But the last great step in this preliminary period came after four
years of stumbling. The effects of neutron bombardment of uranium, the
most complex element known, had been studied by some of the ablest
physicists. The results were striking but confusing. The story of their
gradual interpretation is irftricate and highly technical. . . .

DISCOVERY OF URANIUM FISSION

As has already been mentioned, the neutron proved to be the most
effective particle for inducing nuclear changes. This was particularly true
for the elements of highest atomic number and weight where the large
nuclear charge exerts strong repulsive forces on deuteron or proton pro-
jectiles but not on uncharged neutrons. The results of the bombardment
of uranium by neutrons had proved interesting and puzzling. First studied

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 699

by Fermi and his colleagues in 1934, they were not properly interpreted
until several years later.

On January 16, 1939, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, Denmark, arrived in
this country to spend several months in Princeton, N. J., and was par-
ticularly anxious to discuss some abstract problems with A. Einstein.
(Four years later Bohr was to escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark in a
small boat.) Just before Bohr left Denmark two of his colleagues, O. R.
Frisch and L. Meitner (both refugees from Germany), had told him their
guess that the absorption of a neutron by a uranium nucleus sometimes
caused that nucleus to split into approximately equal parts with the re-
lease of enormous quantities of energy, a process that soon began to be
called nuclear "fission." The occasion for this hypothesis was the im-
portant discovery of O. Hahn and F. Strassmann in Germany which
proved that an isotope of barium was produced by neutron bombardment
of uranium. Immediately on arrival in the United States Bohr communi-
cated this idea to his former student J. A. Wheeler and others at Princeton,
and from them the news spread by word of mouth to neighboring
physicists including E. Fermi at Columbia University. As a result of
conversations between Fermi, J. R. Dunning, and G. B. Pegram, a search
was undertaken at Columbia for the heavy pulses of ionization that would
be expected from the flying fragments of the uranium nucleus. On Janu-
ary 26, 1939 there was a Conference on Theoretical Physics at Washing-
ton, D. C., sponsored jointly by the George Washington University and
the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fermi left New York to attend
this meeting before the Columbia fission experiments had been tried. At
the meeting Bohr and Fermi discussed the problem of fission, and in
particular Fermi mentioned the possibility that neutrons might be emitted
during the process. Although this was only a guess, its implication of the
possibility of a chain reaction was obvious. . . .

GENERAL DISCUSSION OF FISSION

Consider the suggestion of Frisch and Meitner in the light of the two
general trends that had been discovered in nuclear structure: — first, that
the proportion of neutrons goes up with atomic number; second, that the
binding energy per particle is a maximum for the nuclei of intermediate
atomic number. Suppose the U-238 nucleus is broken exactly in half; then,
neglecting the mass of the incident neutron, we have two nuclei of atomic
number 46 and mass number 119. But the heaviest stable isotope of pal-
ladium (Z = 46) has a mass number of only no. Therefore to reach
stability each of these imaginary new nuclei must eject nine neutrons, or
four neutrons in each nucleus must convert themselves to protons by

700 ATOMIC FISSION

emitting electrons thereby forming stable tin nuclei of mass number 119
and atomic number 50; or a combination of such ejections and conversions
must occur to give some other pair of stable nuclei. Actually, as was sug-
gested by Hahn and Strassmann's identification of barium (Z = 56, A =
135 to 140) as a product of fission, the split occurs in such a way as to
produce two unequal parts of mass numbers about 140 and 90 with the
emission of a few neutrons and subsequent radioactive decay by electron
emission until stable nuclei are formed. Calculations from binding-energy
data show that any such rearrangement gives an aggregate resulting mass
considerably less than the initial mass of the uranium nucleus, and thus
that a great deal of energy must be released.

Evidently, there were three major implications of the phenomenon of
fission : the release of energy, the production of radioactive atomic species
and the possibility of a neutron chain reaction. The energy release might
reveal itself in kinetic energy of the fission fragments and in the sub-
sequent radioactive disintegration of the products. The possibility of a
neutron chain reaction depended on whether neutrons were in fact
emitted — a possibility which required investigation.

These were the problems suggested by the discovery of fission, the
kind of problem reported in the journals in 1939 and 1940 and since then
investigated largely in secret. The study of the fission process itself, in-
cluding production of neutrons and fast fragments, has been largely carried
out by physicists using counters, cloud chambers, etc. The study and
identification of the fission products has been carried out largely by
chemists, who have had to perform chemical separations rapidly even
with sub-microscopic quantities of material and to make repeated deter-
minations of the half-lives of unstable isotopes. We shall summarize the
state of knowledge as of June 1940. By that time the principal facts about
fission had been discovered and revealed to the scientific world. A chain
reaction had not been obtained, but its possibility — at least in principle —
was clear and several paths that might lead to it had been suggested. . . .

SUGGESTION OF PLUTONIUM FISSION

It was realized that radiative capture of neutrons by 11-238 would
probably lead by two successive beta-ray emissions to the formation of
a nucleus for which Z=94 and ^ = 239. Consideration of the Bohr-
Wheeler theory of fission and of certain empirical relations among the
nuclei by L. A. Turner and others suggested that this nucleus would be
a fairly stable alpha emitter and would probably undergo fission when
bombarded by thermal neutrons. . . .

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 701

SUMMARY

Looking back on the year 1940, we see that all the prerequisites to a
serious attack on the problem of producing atomic bombs and controlling
atomic power were at hand. It had been proved that mass and energy
were equivalent. It had been proved that the neutrons initiating fission of
uranium reproduced themselves in the process and that therefore a mul-
tiplying chain reaction might occur with explosive force. To be sure, no
one knew whether the required conditions could be achieved, but many
scientists had clear ideas as to the problems involved and the directions
in which solutions might be sought. . . .

FROM CHAPTER II. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

THE CHAIN-REACTION PROBLEM

The principle of operation of an atomic bomb or power plant utilizing
uranium fission is simple enough. If one neutron causes a fission that
produces more than one new neutron, the number of fissions may increase
tremendously with the release of enormous amounts of energy. It is a
question of probabilities. Neutrons produced in the fission process may
escape entirely from the uranium, may be captured by uranium in a
process not resulting in fission, or may be captured by an impurity. Thus
the question of whether a chain reaction does or does not go depends on
the result of a competition among four processes:

(1) escape,

(2) non-fission capture by uranium,

(3) non-fission capture by impurities,

(4) fission capture.

If the loss of neutrons by the first three processes is less than the surplus
produced by the fourth, the chain reaction occurs; otherwise it does not.
Evidently any one of the first three processes may have such a high
probability in a given arrangement that the extra neutrons created by
fission will be insufficient to keep the reaction going. For example, should
it turn out that process (2)— non-fission capture by uranium— has a much
higher probability than fission capture, there would presumably be no pos-
sibility of achieving a chain reaction.
An additional complication is that natural uranium contains three

702 ATOMIC FISSION

isotopes : U-234, U-235, and U-238, present to the extent of approximately
0.006, 0.7, and 99.3 per cent, respectively. The probabilities of processes (2)
and (4) are different for different isotopes. We have also seen that the
probabilities are different for neutrons of different energies.

We shall now consider the limitations imposed by the first three
processes and how their effects can be minimized.

NEUTRON ESCAPE; CRITICAL SIZE

The relative number of neutrons which escape from a quantity of
uranium can be minimized by changing the size and shape. In a sphere
any surface effect is proportional to the square of the radius, and any
volume effect is proportional to the cube of the radius. Now the escape of
neutrons from a quantity of uranium is a surface effect depending on the
area of the surface, but fission capture occurs throughout the material and
is therefore a volume effect. Consequently the greater the amount of
uranium, the less probable it is that neutron escape will predominate over
fission capture and prevent a chain reaction. Loss of neutrons by non-fission
capture is a volume effect like neutron production by fission capture, so
that increase in size makes no change in its relative importance.

The critical size of a device containing uranium is defined as the size for
which the production of free neutrons by fission is just equal to their
loss by escape and by non-fission capture. In other words, if the size is
smaller than critical, then — by definition — no chain reaction will sustain
itself. In principle it was possible in 1940 to calculate the critical size,
but in practice the uncertainty of the constants involved was so great that
the various estimates differed widely. It seemed not improbable that
the critical size might be too large for practical purposes. Even now
estimates for untried arrangements vary somewhat from time to time
as new information becomes available.

USE OF A MODERATOR TO REDUCE NON-FISSION CAPTURE

Thermal neutrons have the highest probability of producing fission of
U-235 but the neutrons emitted in the process of fission have high speeds.
Evidently it is an oversimplification to say that the chain reaction might
maintain itself if more neutrons were created by fission than were absorbed.
For the probability both of fission capture and of non-fission capture
depends on the speed of the neutrons. Unfortunately, the speed at which
non-fission capture is most probable is intermediate between the average
speed of neutrons emitted in the fission process and the speed at which
fission capture is most probable.

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 703

For some years before the discovery of fission, the customary way of
slowing down neutrons was to cause them to pass through material of low
atomic weight, such as hydrogenous material. The process of slowing
down or moderation is simply one of elastic collisions between high-speed
particles and particles practically at rest. The more nearly identical the
masses of neutron and struck particle the greater the loss of kinetic
energy by the neutron. Therefore the light elements are most effective
as "moderators," i.e., slowing down agents, for neutrons.

It occurred to a number of physicists that it might be possible to
mix uranium with a moderator in such a way that the high-speed fission
neutrons, after being ejected from uranium and before re-encountering
uranium nuclei, would have their speeds reduced below the speeds for
which non-fission capture is highly probable. Evidently the characteristics
of a good moderator are that it should be of low atomic weight and that
it should have little or no tendency to absorb neutrons. Lithium and
boron are excluded on the latter count. Helium is difficult to use because
it is a gas and forms no compounds. The choice of moderator therefore
lay among hydrogen, deuterium, beryllium, and carbon. Even now no
one of these substances can be excluded from the list of practical possi-
bilities. It was E. Fermi and L. Szilard who proposed the use of graphite
as a moderator for a chain reaction.

USE OF A LATTICE TO REDUCE NON-FISSION CAPTURE

The general scheme of using a moderator mixed with the uranium
was pretty obvious. A specific manner of using a moderator was first
suggested in this country, so far as we can discover, by Fermi and
Szilard. The idea was to use lumps of uranium of considerable size im-
bedded in a matrix of moderator material. Such a lattice can be shown
to have real advantages over a homogeneous mixture. As the constants
were more accurately determined, it became possible to calculate theoreti-
cally the type of lattice that would be most effective.

REDUCTION OF NON-FISSION CAPTURE BY ISOTOPE SEPARATION

For neutrons of certain intermediate speeds (corresponding to energies
of a few electron volts) U-238 has a large capture cross section for the
production of U-239 but not for fission. There is also a considerable prob-
ability of inelastic (i.e., non-capture-producing) collisions between high-
speed neutrons and 11-238 nuclei. Thus the presence of the U-238 tends
both to reduce the speed of the fast neutrons and to effect the capture
of those of moderate speed. Although there may be some non-fission

704 ATOMIC FISSION

capture by U-235, it is evident that if we can separate the U-235 from the
U-238 and discard the U-238, we ran reduce non-fission capture and can
thus promote the chain reaction. In fact, the probability of fission of
U-235 by high-speed neutrons may be great enough to make the use
of a moderator unnecessary once the 11-238 has been removed. Unfor-
tunately, U-235 is present in natural uranium only to the extent of about
one part in 140. Also, the relatively small difference in mass between the
two isotopes makes separation difficult. , . .

PRODUCTION AND PURIFICATION OF MATERIALS

If we are to hope to achieve a chain reaction, we must reduce effect (3) —
non-fission capture by impurities — to the point where it is not serious.
This means very careful purification of the uranium metal and very
careful purification of the moderator. Calculations show that the maxi-
mum permissible concentrations of many impurity elements are a few
parts per million — in either the uranium or the moderator. When it is
recalled that up to 1940 the total amount of uranium metal produced in
this country was not more than a few grams and even this was of doubtful
purity, that the total amount of metallic beryllium produced in this
country was not more than a few pounds, that the total amount of con-
centrated deuterium produced was not more than a few pounds, and that
carbon had never been produced in quantity with anything like the
purity required of a moderator, it is clear that the problem of producing
and purifying materials was a major one. . . .

POSSIBILITY OF USING PLUTONIUM

So far, all our discussion has been primarily concerned with the use of
uranium itself. The element of atomic number 94 and mass 239, commonly
referred to as plutonium, might be very effective. Actually, we now be-
lieve it to be of value comparable to pure ^235. We have mentioned the
difficulty of separating U-235 from the more abundant isotope U-238.
These two isotopes are, of course, chemically identical. But plutonium,
although produced from ^238, is a different chemical element. Therefore,
if a process could be worked out for converting some of the U-238 to
plutonium, a chemical separation of the plutonium from uranium might
prove more practicable than the isotopic separation of U-235 from U-238.

Suppose that we have set up a controllable chain reaction in a lattice
of natural uranium and a moderator — say carbon, in the term of graphite.
Then as the chain reaction proceeds, neutrons are emitted in the process
of fission of the U-235 and many of these neutrons are absorbed by U-238.

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 705

This produces U-239, each atom of which then emits a beta particle, be-
coming neptunium (osNp239). Neptunium, in turn, emits another beta
particle, becoming plutonium (94Pu230), which emits an alpha particle,
decaying again to U-235, but so slowly that in effect it is a stable element.
If, after the reaction has been allowed to proceed for a considerable
time, the mixture of metals is removed, it may be possible to extract
the plutonium by chemical methods and purify it for use in a subsequent
fission chain reaction of an explosive nature.

COMBINED EFFECTS AND ENRICHED PILES

Three ways of increasing the likelihood of a chain reaction have been
mentioned: use of a moderator; attainment of high purity of materials;
use of special material, either ^235 or Pu. The three procedures are
not mutually exclusive, and many schemes have been proposed for using
small amounts of separated ^235 or Pu-239 in a lattice composed pri-
marily of ordinary uranium or uranium oxide and of a moderator or
two different moderators. Such proposed arrangements are usually
called "enriched piles." . . .

AMOUNTS OF MATERIALS NEEDED

Obviously it was impossible in the summer of 1940 to make more than
guesses as to what amounts of materials would be needed to produce:

(1) a chain reaction with use of a moderator:

(2) a chain-reaction bomb in pure, or at least enriched, 11-235 or
plutonium.

A figure of one to one hundred kilograms of U-235 was commonly
given at this time for the critical size of a bomb. This would, of course,
have to be separated from at least 140 times as much natural uranium.
For a slow-neutron chain reaction using a moderator and unseparated
uranium it was almost certain that tons of metal and of moderator would
be required. . . .

HEALTH HAZARDS

It had been known for a long time that radioactive materials were
dangerous. They give off very penetrating radiations — gamma rays — which
are much like X-rays in their physiological effects. They also give off
beta and alpha rays which, although less penetrating, can still be danger-
ous. The amounts of radium used in hospitals and in ordinary physical

706 ATOMIC FISSION

measurements usually comprise but a few milligrams. The amounts of
radioactive material produced by the fission of uranium in a relatively
small chain-reacting system may be equivalent to hundreds or thousands
of grams of radium. A chain-reacting system also gives off intense neutron
radiation known to be comparable to gamma rays as regards health
hazards. Quite apart from its radioactive properties, uranium is poison-
ous chemically. Thus, nearly all work in this field is hazardous—
particularly work on chain reactions and the resulting radioactive
products. . . .

POWER VS. BOMB

The expected military advantages of uranium bombs were far more
spectacular than those of a uranium power plant. It was conceivable
that a few uranium bombs might be decisive in winning the war for
the side first putting them into use. Such thoughts were very much in
the minds of those working in this field, but the attainment of a slow-
neutron chain reaction seemed a necessary preliminary step in the develop-
ment of our knowledge and became the first objective of the group
interested in the problem. This also seemed an important step in con-
vincing military authorities and the more skeptical scientists that the
whole notion was not a pipe dream. . . .

MILITARY USEFULNESS

If all the atoms in a kilogram of U-235 undergo fission, the energy re-
leased is equivalent to the energy released in the explosion of about
20,000 short tons of TNT. If the critical size of a bomb turns out to
be practical — say, in the range of one to one hundred kilograms— and
all the other problems can be solved, there remain two questions. First,
how large a percentage of the fissionable nuclei can be made to undergo
fission before the reaction stops; i.e., what is the efficiency of the explosion?
Second, what is the effect of so concentrated a release of energy? Even
if only i per cent of the theoretically available energy is released, the ex-
plosion will still be of a totally different order of magnitude from that
produced by any previously known type of bomb. The value of such
a bomb was thus a question for military experts to consider very carefully.

SUMMARY

It had been established (i) that uranium fission did occur witb re-
lease of great amounts of energy; and (2) that in the process extra

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 707

neutrons were set free which might start a chain reaction. It was not
contrary to any known principle that such a reaction should take place
and that it should have very important military application as a bomb.
However, the idea was revolutionary and therefore suspect; it was certain
that many technical operations of great difficulty would have to be
worked out before such a bomb could be produced. Probably the only
materials satisfactory for a bomb were either U-235, which would have
to be separated from the 140-times more abundant isotope 11-238, or
Pu-239, an isotope of the hitherto unknown element plutonium, which
would have to be generated by a controlled chain-reacting process itself
hitherto unknown. To achieve such a controlled chain reaction it was
clear that uranium metal and heavy water or beryllium or carbon might
have to be produced in great quantity with high purity. . . .

FROM CHAPTER IV. PROGRESS UP TO DECEMBER 1941

THE IMMEDIATE QUESTIONS

Early in the summer of 1940 the questions of most immediate im-
portance were:

(1) Could any circumstances be found under which the chain reaction
would go?

(2) Could the isotope U-235 be separated on a large scale?

(3) Could moderator and other materials be obtained in sufficient
purity and quantity?

Although there were many subsidiary problems, as will appear in the
account of the progress made in the succeeding eighteen months, these
three questions determined the course of the work. . . .

THE CHAIN REACTION

INITIATION OF NEW PROGRAMS

Early in 1941 interest in the general chain-reaction problem by indi-
viduals at Princeton, Chicago and California led to the approval of cer-
tain projects at those institutions. Thereafter the work of these groups was
co-ordinated with the work at Columbia, forming parts of a single
large program.

708 ATOMIC FISSION

WORK ON RESONANCE ABSORPTION

There were advantages in a lattice structure or "pile" with uranium
concentrated in lumps regularly distributed in a matrix of moderator.
This was the system on which the Columbia group was working. As is
so often the case, the fundamental idea is a simple one. If the uranium
and the moderator are mixed homogeneously, the neutrons on the average
will lose energy in small steps between passages through the uranium
so that in the course of their reduction to thermal velocity the chance of
their passing through uranium at any given velocity, e.g., at a velocity
corresponding to resonance absorption, is great. But, if the uranium is in
large lumps spaced at large intervals in the moderator, the amounts of
energy lost by neutrons between passages from one lump of uranium to
another will be large and the chance of their reaching a uranium
lump with energy just equal to the energy of resonance absorption is
relatively small. Thus the chance of absorption by 11-238 to produce U-239,
compared to the chance of absorption as thermal neutrons to cause
fission, may be reduced sufficiently to allow a chain reaction to take
place. . . .

THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE EXPERIMENTS

About July, 1941, the first lattice structure of graphite and uranium
was set up at Columbia. It was a graphite cube about 8 feet on an edge,
and contained about 7 tons of uranium oxide in iron containers dis-
tributed at equal intervals throughout the graphite. . . .

Evidently the absorption of neutrons by U-238 to produce U-239 tends
to reduce the number of neutrons, while the fissions tend to increase the
number. The question is: Which predominates? or, more precisely, Does
the fission production of neutrons predominate over all neutron-removal
processes other than escape? Interpretation of the experimental data
on this crucial question involves many corrections, calculations, and ap-
proximations, but all reduce in the end to a single number, the multi-
plication factor k.

THE MULTIPLICATION FACTOR K

The whole success or failure of the uranium project depended on the
multiplication factor k, sometimes called the reproduction factor. If k
could be made greater than i in a practical system, the project would
succeed; if not, the chain reaction would never be more than a dream. . . .

All agreed that the multiplication factor could be increased by greater
purity of materials, different lattice arrangements, etc. None could say
with certainty that it could be made greater than i.

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 709

WORK ON PLUTONIUM

Mention was made of the suggestion that the element 94, later
christened plutonium, would be formed by beta-ray disintegrations of
U-239 resulting from neutron absorption by 11-238 and that plutonium
would probably be an alpha-particle emitter of long half-life and would
undergo fission when bombarded by neutrons. In the summer of 1940
the nuclear physics group at the University of California in Berkeley
was urged to use neutrons from its powerful cyclotron for the production
of plutonium, and to separate it from uranium and investigate its fission
properties. Various pertinent experiments were performed and were re-
ported by E. O. Lawrence to the National Academy Committee (see
below) in May, 1941 and also in a memorandum that was incorporated
in the Committee's second report dated July n, 1941. It will be seen that
this memorandum includes one important idea not specifically emphasized
by others, namely, the production of large quantities of plutonium for
use in a bomb.

We quote from Lawrence's memorandum as follows: "Since the first
report of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Atomic Fission,
an extremely important new possibility has been opened for the exploita-
tion of the chain reaction with unseparated isotopes of uranium. Experi-
ments in the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California have
indicated (a) that element 94 is formed as a result of capture of a
neutron by uranium 238 followed by two successive beta-transformations,
and furthermore (b) that this transuranic element undergoes slow neutron
fission and therefore presumably behaves like uranium 235.

"It appears accordingly that, if a chain reaction with unseparated
isotopes is achieved, it may be allowed to proceed violently for a period
of time for the express purpose of manufacturing element 94 in sub-
stantial amounts. This material could be extracted by ordinary chemistry
and would presumably be the equivalent of uranium 235 for chain
reaction purposes.

"If this is so, the following three outstanding important possibilities
are opened:

"i. Uranium 238 would be available for energy production, thus in-
creasing about one hundred fold the total atomic energy obtainable from
a given quantity of uranium.

"2. Using element 94 one may envisage preparation of small chain re-
action units for power purposes weighing perhaps a hundred pounds
instead of a hundred tons as probably would be necessary for units
using natural uranium.

710 ATOMIC FISSION

"3. If large amounts of element 94 were available it is likely that a
chain reaction with fast neutrons could be produced. In such a reaction
the energy would be released at an explosive rate which might be
described as 'super bomb.' ". , ,

ISOTOPE SEPARATION

The need of larger samples of 11-235 stimulated E. O. Lawrence at
Berkeley to work on electromagnetic separation. He was remarkably
successful and by December 6, 1941 reported that he could deposit in
one hour one microgram of U-235 from which a large proportion of the
U-238 had been removed. . . .

THE CENTRIFUGE AND GASEOUS DIFFUSION METHODS

Though we have made it clear that the separation of ^235 from 11-238
might be fundamental to the whole success of the project, little has been
said about work in this field. Such work had been going on since the
summer of 1940 under the general direction of H. C. Urey at
Columbia. . . .

After careful review and a considerable amount of experimenting on
other methods, it had been concluded that the two most promising
methods of separating large quantities of U-235 from U-238 were by the
use of centrifuges and by the use of diffusion through porous barriers.
In the centrifuge, the forces acting on the two isotopes are slightly differ-
ent because of their differences in mass. In the diffusion through barriers,
the rates of diffusion are slightly different for the two isotopes, again
because of their differences in mass. Each method required the uranium
to be in gaseous form, which was an immediate and serious limitation
since the only suitable gaseous compound of uranium then known was
uranium hexafluoride. In each method the amount of enrichment to be
expected in a single production unit or "stage" was very small; this indi-
cated that many successive stages would be necessary if a high degree
of enrichment was to be attained.

By the end of 1941 each method had been experimentally demonstrated
in principle; that is, single-stage separators had effected the enrichment
of the U-235 on a laboratory scale to about the degree predicted theoreti-
cally. K. Cohen of Columbia and others had developed the theory for
the single units and for the series or "cascade" of units that would be
needed. Thus it was possible to estimate that about 5,000 stages would be
necessary for one type of diffusion system and that a total area of many

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 711

acres of diffusion barrier would be required ID a plant separating a
kilogram of 11-235 each day. Corresponding cost estimates were tens of
millions of dollars. For the centrifuge the number of stages would be
smaller, but it was predicted that a similar production by centrifuges
would require 22,000 separately driven, extremely high-speed centrifuges,
each three feet in length at a comparable cost.

Of course, the cost estimates could not be made accurately since the
technological problems were almost completely unsolved, but these
estimates as to size and cost of plant did serve to emphasize the magni-
tude of the undertaking. . . .

PRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS OF MATERIALS

By the end of 1941 not very much progress had been made in the pro-
duction of materials for use in a chain-reacting system. The National
Bureau of Standards and the Columbia group were in contact with the
Metal Hydrides Company of Beverly, Massachusetts. This company was
producing some uranium in powdered form, but efforts to increase its
production and to melt the powdered metal into solid ingots had not been
very successful.

Similarly, no satisfactory arrangement had been made for obtaining
large amounts of highly purified graphite. The graphite in use at Colum-
bia had been obtained from the U. S. Graphite Company of Saginaw,
Michigan. It was of high purity for a commercial product, but it did
contain about one part in 500,000 of boron, which was undesirable. . . .

To summarize, by the end of 1941 there was no evidence that procure-
ment of materials in sufficient quantity and purity was impossible, but
the problems were far from solved. , . ,

NATIONAL ACADEMY COMMITTEE REPORT

The third report (of a National Academy Committee, November 6,
1941) was specifically concerned with the "possibilities of an explosive
fission reaction with U-235." Although neither of the first two National
Academy reports indicated that uranium would be likely to be of decisive
importance in the war, this possibility was emphasized in the third report.
We can do no better than quote portions of this report.

"Since our last report, the progress toward separation of the isotopes of
uranium has been such as to make urgent a consideration of (i) the
probability of success in the attempt to produce a fission bomb, (2) the
destructive effect to be expected from such a bomb, (3) the anticipated

712 ATOMIC FISSION

time before its development can be completed and production be under-
way, and (4) a preliminary estimate of the costs involved.

"i. Conditions for a fission bomb. A fission bomb of superlatively de-
structive power will result from bringing quickly together a sufficient
mass of element U-2^. This seems to be as sure as any untried prediction
based upon theory and experiment can be. Our calculations indicate
further that the required masses can be brought together quickly enough
for the reaction to become efficient . . .

"2. Destructive effect of fission bombs, (a) Mass of the bomb. The mass
of U-2J5 required to produce explosive fission under appropriate con-
ditions can hardly be less than 2 l(g nor greater than 100 t^g. These wide
limits reflect chiefly the experimental uncertainty in the capture cross
section of U-235 for fast neutrons . . . (b) Energy released by explosive
fission. Calculations for the case of masses properly located at the initial
instant indicate that between i and 5 per cent of the fission energy of the
uranium should be released at a fission explosion. This means from 2 to
10 X io8 kilocalories per kg of uranium 235. The available explosive energy
per 1(g of uranium is thus equivalent to about 500 tons of TNT.

"3. Time required for development and production of the necessary
U-2J5. (a) Amount of uranium needed. Since the destructiveness of
present bombs is already an important factor in warfare, it is evident
that, if the destructiveness of the bombs is thus increased io,ooo-fold, they
should become of decisive importance.

"The amount of uranium required will, nevertheless, be large. If the
estimate is correct that 500,000 tons of TNT bombs would be required to
devastate Germany's military and industrial objectives, from i to io tons
of U-2j5 will be required to do the same job.

"(b) Separation of U-2tf. The separation of the isotopes of uranium can
be done in the necessary amounts. Several methods are under develop-
ment, at least two of which seem definitely adequate, and are approaching
the stage of practical test. These are the methods of the centrifuge and of
diffusion through porous barriers. Other methods are being investigated
or need study which may ultimately prove superior, but are now farther
from the engineering stage.

"(c) Time required for production of fission bombs. An estimate of
time required for development, engineering and production of fission
bombs can be made only very roughly at this time.

"If all possible effort is spent on the program, one might however expect
fission bombs to be available in significant quantity within three or four
years.

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 713

"4. Rough estimate of costs. (The figures given in the Academy report
under this heading were recognized as only rough estimates since the
scientific and engineering data to make them more precise were not
available. They showed only that the undertaking would be enormously
expensive but still in line with other war expenditures. . . .")

FROM CHAPTER VI. THE METALLURGICAL PROJECT AT

CHICAGO IN 1942

INTRODUCTION

As has been made clear, the information accumulated by the end of
1941 as to the possibility of producing an atomic bomb was such as to
warrant expansion of the work, and this expansion called for an administra-
tive reorganization. It was generally accepted that there was a very high
probability that an atomic bomb of enormous destructive power could be
made, either from concentrated U-235 or from the new element plutonium.
It was proposed, therefore, to institute an intensive experimental and
theoretical program including work both on isotope separation and on
the chain-reaction problems. It was hoped that this program would estab-
lish definitely whether or not ^235 could be separated in significant
quantities from U-238, either by electromagnetic or statistical methods;
whether or not a chain reaction could be established with natural uranium
or its compounds and could be made to yield relatively large quantities
of plutonium; and whether or not the plutonium so produced could be
separated from the parent material, uranium. It was hoped also that the
program would provide the theoretical and experimental data required for
the design of a fast-neutron chain-reacting bomb.

The problems of isotope separation had been assigned to groups under
Lawrence and Urey while the remaining problems were assigned to
Compton's group, which was organized under the cryptically named
"Metallurgical Laboratory" of the University of Chicago. . . .

OBJECTIVES

In accordance with the general objectives just outlined, the initial
objectives of the Metallurgical Laboratory were: first, to find a system
using normal uranium in which a chain reaction would occur; second, to
show that, if such a chain reaction did occur, it would be possible to
separate plutonium chemically from the other material; and, finally, to
obtain the theoretical and experimental data for effecting an explosive

714 ATOMIC FISSION

chain reaction with either U-235 or with plutonium. The ultimate objective
of the laboratory was to prepare plans for the large-scale production of
plutonium and for its use in bombs.

ORGANIZATION OF THE WORK

The laboratory had not only to concern itself with its immediate ob-
jectives but simultaneously to bear in mind the ultimate objectives and to
work toward them on the assumption that the immediate objectives would
be attained. It could not wait for a chain reaction to be achieved before
studying the chemistry of plutonium. It had to assume that plutonium
would be separated and to go ahead with the formulation of plans for
its production and use. Consequently problems were continually redefined
as new information became available, and research programs were re-
assessed almost from week to week. . . .

PROCUREMENT OF MATERIALS

GENERAL

It has been made clear that the procurement of materials of sufficient
purity was a major part of the problem. As far as uranium was con-
cerned, it seemed likely that it would be needed in highly purified
metallic form or at least as highly purified uranium oxide. The other
materials which were going to be needed were either graphite, heavy
water, or possibly beryllium. It was clear at this time that, however
advantageous heavy water might be as a moderator, no large quantities
of it would be available for months or years. Beryllium seemed less
advantageous and almost as difficult to get. Therefore the procurement
efforts for a moderator were centered on graphite. . . .

URANIUM ORE

Obviously there would be no point in undertaking this whole project
if it were not going to be possible to find enough uranium for producing
the bombs. Early indications were favorable, and a careful survey made
in November, 1942, showed that immediate delivery could be made of
adequate tonnages of uranium ores. . . .

GRAPHITE PROCUREMENT

At the beginning of 1942 graphite production was still unsatisfactory
but it was, of course, in quite a different condition from the metal pro-
duction since the industrial production of graphite had already been very

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 715

large. The problem was merely one of purity and priority. Largely through
the efforts of N. Hilberry, the National Carbon Company and the Speer
Carbon Company were both drawn into the picture. Following sugges-
tions made by the experts of the National Bureau of Standards, these
companies were able to produce highly purified graphite with a neutron
absorption some 20 per cent less than the standard commercial materials
previously used. . . .

THE FIRST SELF-SUSTAINING CHAIN-REACTING PILE

By the fall of 1942 enough graphite, uranium oxide, and uranium metal
were available at Chicago to justify an attempt to build an actual self-
sustaining chain-reacting pile. But the amount of metal available was
small — only about 6 tons — and other materials were none too plentiful
and of varying quality. These conditions rather than optimum efficiency
controlled the design.

The pile was constructed on the lattice principle with graphite as a
moderator and lumps of metal or oxide as the reacting units regularly
spaced through the graphite to form the lattice. Instruments situated at
various points in the pile or near it indicated the neutron intensity, and
movable strips of absorbing material served as controls. . . .

The pile was first operated as a self-sustaining system on December 2,
1942. So far as we know, this was the first time that human beings ever
initiated a self-maintaining nuclear chain reaction. Initially the pile was
operated at a power level of l/2 watt, but on December 12 the power level
was raised to 200 watts. . . .

CONCLUSION

Evidently this experiment, performed on December 2 just as a reviewing
committee was appraising the Chicago project, answered beyond all
shadow of doubt the first question before the Metallurgical Laboratory;
a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction had been produced in a system
using normal uranium. . . .

RELATION BETWEEN POWER AND PRODUCTION OF PLUTONIUM

The immediate object of building a uranium-graphite pile was to prove
that there were conditions under which a chain reaction would occur,
but the ultimate objective of the laboratory was to produce plutonium
by a chain reaction. Therefore we are interested in the relation between
the power at which a pile operates and the rate at which it produces
plutonium. The relation may be evaluated to a first approximation rather
easily. . . .

The first chain-reacting pile that we have described operated at a
maximum of 200 watts. Assuming that a single bomb will require the

716 ATOMIC FISSION

order of one to 100 kilograms of plutonium, the pile that has been described
would have to be kept going at least 70,000 years to produce a single
bomb. Evidently the problem of quantity production of plutonium was
not yet solved.

THE CHEMISTRY OF PLUTONIUM

The second specific objective of the Metallurgical Laboratory was to
show that, if a chain reaction did occur, it would be feasible to separate
the plutonium chemically from the other material with which it is
found. . . .

Successful microchemical preparation of some plutonium salts and a
study of their properties led to the general conclusion that it was possible
to separate plutonium chemically from the other materials in the pile.
This conclusion represents the attainment of the second immediate ob-
jective of the Metallurgical Laboratory. Thus, by the end of 1942, plu-
tonium, entirely unknown eighteen months earlier, was considered an
element whose chemical behavior was as well understood as that of
several of the elements of the old periodic table. . . .

On the basis of the evidence available it was clear that a plutonium
production rate somewhere between a kilogram a month and a kilogram
a day would be required. At the rate of a kilogram a day, a 500,000 to
1,500,000 kilowatt plant would be required. (The ultimate capacity of
the hydroelectric power plants at the Grand Coulee Dam is expected
to be 2,000,000 kw.) Evidently the creation of a plutonium production
plant of the required size was to be a major enterprise even without
attempting to utilize the thermal energy liberated. Nevertheless, by
November, 1942, most of the problems had been well defined and tenta-
tive solutions had been proposed. . . .

FROM CHAPTER VII. THE PLUTONIUM PRODUCTION
PROBLEM AS OF FEBRUARY 1943

THE SCALE OF PRODUCTION

The first decision to be made was on the scale of production that should
be attempted. For reasons of security the figure decided upon may not be
disclosed here. It was very large.

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM

The production of one gram of plutonium per day corresponds to a
generation of energy at the rate of 500 to 1,500 kilowatts. Therefore a

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 717

plant for large-scale production of plutonium will release a very large
amount of energy. The problem therefore was to design a plant of this
capacity on the basis of experience with a pile that could operate at a
power level of only 0.2 kilowatt. As regards the plutonium separation
work, which was equally important, it was necessary to draw plans for
an extraction and purification plant which would separate some grams a
day of plutonium from some tons of uranium, and such planning had
to be based on information obtained by microchemical studies involving
only half a milligram of plutonium. To be sure, there was information
available for the design of the large-scale pile and separation plant from
auxiliary experiments and from large-scale studies of separation processes
using uranium as a stand-in for plutonium, but even so the proposed
extrapolations both as to chain-reacting piles and as to separation processes
were staggering. In peacetime no engineer or scientist in his right mind
would consider making such a magnification in a single stage, and even
in wartime only the possibility of achieving tremendously important
results could justify it. ...

CHOICE OF PLANT SITE

Once the scale of production had been agreed upon and the responsibili-
ties assigned, the nature of the plant and its whereabouts had to be decided.
The site in the Tennessee Valley, known officially as the Clinton Engineer
Works, had been acquired by the Army. . . .

Reconsideration at the end of 1942 led General Groves to the conclusion
that this site was not sufficiently isolated for a large-scale plutonium pro-
duction plant. At that time, it was conceivable that conditions might arise
under which a large pile might spread radioactive material over a large
enough area to endanger neighboring centers of population. In addition
to the requirement of isolation, there remained the requirement of a
large power supply which had originally determined the choice of the
Tennessee site. To meet these two requirements a new site was chosen
and acquired on the Columbia River in the central part of the State of
Washington near the Grand Coulee power line. This site was known as
the Hanford Engineer Works. . . ,

NATURE OF THE LATTICE

The lattices we have been describing heretofore consisted of lumps of
uranium embedded in the graphite moderator. There are two objections
to such a type of lattice for production purposes: first, it is difficult to
remove the uranium without disassembling the pile; second, it is difficult
to concentrate the coolant at the uranium lumps, which are the points of

718 ATOMIC FISSION

maximum production of heat. It was fairly obvious that both these diffi-
culties could be avoided if a rod lattice rather than a point lattice could
be used, that is, if the uranium could be concentrated along lines passing
through the moderator instead of being situated merely at points. . . .

LOADING AND UNLOADING

Once the idea of a lattice with cylindrical symmetry was accepted, it
became evident that the pile could be unloaded and reloaded without dis-
assembly since the uranium could be pushed out of the cylindrical channels
in the graphite moderator and new uranium inserted. The decision had
to be made as to whether the uranium should be in the form of long rods,
which had advantages from the nuclear-physics point of view, or of rela-
tively short cylindrical pieces, which had advantages from the point of
view of handling. In either case, the materials would be so very highly
radioactive that unloading would have to be carried out by remote control,
and the unloaded uranium would have to be handled by remote control
from behind shielding.

POSSIBLE MATERIALS; CORROSION

If water was to be used as coolant, it would have to be conveyed to the
regions where heat was generated through channels of some sort. Since
graphite pipes were not practical, some other kind of pipe would have to
be used. But the choice of the material for the pipe, like the choice of all
the materials to be used in the pile, was limited by nuclear-physics con-
siderations. The pipes must be made of some material whose absorption
cross section for neutrons was not large enough to bring the value of k
below unity. Furthermore, the pipes must be made of material which
would not disintegrate under the heavy density of neutron and gamma
radiation present in the pile. Finally, the pipes must meet all ordinary
requirements of cooling-system pipes: they must not leak; they must not
corrode; they must not warp. . . .

While the choice of material for the piping was very difficult, similar
choices — involving both nuclear-physics criteria and radiation-resistance
criteria — had to be made for all other materials that were to be used in
the pile. For example, the electric insulating materials to be used in any
instruments buried in the pile must not disintegrate under the radiation.
In certain instances where control or experimental probes had to be in-
serted and removed from the pile, the likelihood had to be borne in mind
that the probes would become intensely radioactive as a result of their
exposure in the pile and that the degree to which this would occur would
depend on the material used. . . .

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 719

PROTECTION OF THE URANIUM FROM CORROSION

The most efficient cooling procedure would have been to have the
water flowing in direct contact with the uranium in which the heat was
being produced. Indications were that this was probably out of the question
because the uranium would react chemically with the water, at least to
a sufficient extent to put a dangerous amount of radioactive material
into solution and probably to the point of disintegrating the uranium
slugs. Therefore it was necessary to find some method of protecting the
uranium from direct contact with the water. Two possibilities were con-
sidered: one was some sort of coating, either by electroplating or dipping;
the other was sealing the uranium slug in a protective jacket or "can."
Strangely enough, this "canning problem" turned out to be one of the
most difficult problems encountered in such piles.

WATER SUPPLY

The problem of dissipating thousands of kilowatts of energy is by no
means a small one. How much water was needed depended, of course,
on the maximum temperature to which the water could safely be heated
and the maximum temperature to be expected in the intake from the
Columbia River; certainly the water supply requirement was comparable
to that of a fair-sized city. Pumping stations, filtration and treatment
plants all had to be provided. Furthermore, the system had to be a very
reliable one; it was necessary to provide fast-operating controls to shut
down the chain-reacting unit in a hurry in case of failure of the water
supply. If it was decided to use "once-through" cooling instead of re-
circulation, a retention basin would be required so that the radioactivity
induced in the water might die down before the water was returned to
the river. The volume of water discharged was going to be so great that
such problems of radioactivity were important, and therefore the mini-
mum time that the water must be held for absolute safety had to be
determined. . . .

SHIELDING

The radiation given off from a pile operating at a high power level is
so strong as to make it quite impossible for any of the operating personnel
to go near the pile. Furthermore, this radiation, particularly the neutrons,
has a pronounced capacity for leaking out through holes or cracks in
barriers. The whole of a power pile therefore has to be enclosed in very
thick walls of concrete, steel, or other absorbing material. But at the
same time it has to be possible to load and unload the pile through these

720 ATOMIC FISSION

shields and to carry the water supply in and out through the shields. The
shields should not only be radiation-tight but air-tight since air exposed
to the radiation in the pile would become radioactive.

The radiation dangers that require shielding in the pile continue through
a large part of the separation plant. Since the fission products associated
with the production of the plutonium are highly radioactive, the uranium
after ejection from the pile must be handled by remote control from behind
shielding and must be shielded during transportation to the separation
plant. All the stages of the separation plant, including analyses, must be
handled by remote control from behind shields up to the point where
the plutonium is relatively free of radioactive fission products. . . ,

FROM CHAPTER IX. GENERAL DISCUSSION OF THE
SEPARATION OF ISOTOPES

FACTORS AFFECTING THE SEPARATION OF ISOTOPES

By definition, the isotopes of an element differ in mass but not in

chemical properties For most practical purposes, therefore, the isotopes

of an element are separable only by processes depending on the nuclear
mass. . . .

Except in electromagnetic separators, isotope separation depends on
small differences in the average behavior of molecules. Such effects are
used in six "statistical" separation methods; (i) gaseous diffusion, (2)
distillation, (3) centrifugation, (4) thermal diffusion, (5) exchange
reactions, (6) electrolysis. Probably only (i), (3), and (4) are suitable
for uranium; (2), (5), and (6) are preferred for the separation of deu-
terium from hydrogen. In all these "statistical" methods the separation
factor is small so that many stages are required, but in the case of each
method large amounts of material may be handled. All these methods
had been tried with some success before 1940; however, none had been
used on a large scale and none had been used for uranium. The scale of
production by electromagnetic methods was even smaller but the separa-
tion factor was larger. There were apparent limitations of scale for the
electromagnetic method. There were presumed to be advantages in com-
bining two or more methods because of the differences in performance
at different stages of separation. The problem of developing any or all of
these separation methods was not a scientific one of principle but a
technical one of scale and cost. These developments can therefore be
reported more briefly than those of the plutonium project although they
are no less important. A pilot plant was built using centrifuges and

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 721

operated successfully. No large-scale plant was built. Plants were built
for the production of heavy water by two different methods. . . .

FROM CHAPTER X. THE SEPARATION OF THE URANIUM
ISOTOPES BY GASEOUS DIFFUSION

Work at Columbia University on the separation of isotopes by gaseous
diffusion began in 1940, and by the end of 1942 the problems of large-
scale separation of uranium by this method had been well defined. Since
the amount of separation that could be effected by a single stage was very
small, several thousand successive stages were required. It was found that
the best method of connecting the many stages required extensive re-
cycling so that thousands of times as much material would pass through
the barriers of the lower stages as would ultimately appear as product
from the highest stage.

The principal problems were the development of satisfactory barriers
and pumps. Acres of barrier and thousands of pumps were required. The
obvious process gas was uranium hexafluoride for which the production
and handling difficulties were so great that a search for an alternative
was undertaken. Since much of the separation was to be carried out at
low pressure, problems of vacuum technique arose, and on a previously
unheard-of scale. Many problems of instrumentation and control were
solved; extensive use was made of various forms of mass spectrograph.

The research was carried out principally at Columbia under Dunning
and Urey. In 1942, the M. W. Kellogg Company was chosen to develop
the process and equipment and to design the plant and set up the Kellex
Corporation for the purpose. The plant was built by the J. A. Jones
Construction Company. The Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corporation
was selected as operating company.

A very satisfactory barrier was developed although the final choice of
barrier type was not made until the construction of the plant was well
under way at Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee. Two types of
centrifugal blower were developed. . . .

FROM CHAPTER XL ELECTROMAGNETIC SEPARATION
OF URANIUM ISOTOPES

By the end of December, 1941, when the reorganization of the whole
uranium project was effected, Lawrence had already obtained some

722 ATOMIC FISSION

samples of separated isotopes of uranium and in the reorganization he
was officially placed in charge of the preparation of further samples and
the making of various associated physical measurements. However, just
as the Metallurgical Laboratory very soon shifted its objective from the
physics of the chain reaction to the large-scale production of plutonium,
the objective of Lawrence's division immediately shifted to the effecting
of large-scale separation of uranium isotopes by electromagnetic methods.
This change was prompted by the success of the initial experiments at
California and by the development at California and at Princeton of ideas
on other possible methods. . . .

The calutron mass separator consists of an ion source from which a beam
of uranium ions is drawn by an electric field, an accelerating system in
which the ions are accelerated to high velocities, a magnetic field in which
the ions travel in semicircles of radius depending on ion mass, and a
receiving system. The principal problems of this method involved the
ion source, accelerating system, divergence of the ion beam, space charge,
and utilization of the magnetic field. The chief advantages of the calutron
were large separation factor, small hold-up, short start-up time, and flexi-
bility of operation. By the fall of 1942 sufficient progress had been made to
justify authorization of plant construction, and a year later the first plant
units were ready for trial at the Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee.

Research and development work on the calutron were carried out
principally at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California,
under the direction of Lawrence. Westinghouse, General Electric, and
Allis Chalmers constructed a majority of the parts; Stone and Webster
built the plant, and Tennessee Eastman operated it.

Since the calutron separation method was one of batch operations in a
large number of largely independent units, it was possible to introduce
important improvements even after plant operation had begun.

In the summer of 1944 a thermal-diffusion separation plant was built
at the Clinton Engineer Works to furnish enriched feed material for the
electromagnetic plant and thereby increase the production rate of this
latter plant. The design of the thermal-diffusion plant was based on the
results of research carried out at the Naval Research Laboratory and on
the pilot plant built by the Navy Department at the Philadelphia Navy
Yard.

Although research work on the calutron was started later than on the
centrifuge and diffusion systems, the calutron plant was the first to
produce large amounts of the separated isotopes of uranium. . . .

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 723

FROM CHAPTER XII. THE WORK ON THE ATOMIC BOMB

The entire purpose of the work described in the preceding chapters
was to explore the possibility of creating atomic bombs and to produce
the concentrated fissionable materials which would be required in such
bombs. . . . Security considerations prevent a discussion of many of the
most important phases of this work. . . .

In the choice of a site for this atomic-bomb laboratory, the all-important
considerations were secrecy and safety. It was therefore decided to establish
the laboratory in an isolated location and to sever unnecessary connection
with the outside world.

By November, 1942, a site had been chosen — at Los Alamos, New
Mexico. It was located on a mesa about 30 miles from Santa Fe. One asset
of this site was the availability of considerable area for proving grounds,
but initially the only structures on the site consisted of a handful of
buildings which once constituted a small boarding school. There was no
laboratory, no library, no shop, no adequate power plant. The sole means
of approach was a winding mountain road. That the handicaps of the
site were overcome to a considerable degree is a tribute to the unstinting
efforts of the scientific and military personnel.

J. R. Oppenheimer has been director of the laboratory from the start. . . .

Naturally, the task of assembling the necessary apparatus, machines and
equipment was an enormous one. Three carloads of apparatus from the
Princeton project filled some of the most urgent requirements. A cyclotron
from Harvard, two Van de Graaff generators from Wisconsin, and a
Cockcroft-Walton high-voltage device from Illinois soon arrived. As an
illustration of the speed with which the laboratory was set up, we may
record that the bottom pole piece of the cyclotron magnet was not laid
until April 14, 1943, yet the first experiment was performed in early July.
Other apparatus was acquired in quantity; subsidiary laboratories were
built. Today this is probably the best-equipped physics research laboratory
in the world. . . .

By definition, an explosion is a sudden and violent release of a large
amount of energy in a small region. To produce an efficient explosion in
an atomic bomb, the parts of the bomb must not become appreciably
separated before a substantial fraction of the available nuclear energy has
been released, since expansion leads to increased escape of neutrons from
the system and thus to premature termination of the chain reaction.
Stated differently, the efficiency of the atomic bomb will depend on the
ratio of (a) the speed with which neutrons generated by the first fissions

724 ATOMIC FISSION

get into other nuclei and produce further fission, and (b) the speed with
which the bomb flies apart. Using known principles of energy generation,
temperature and pressure rise, and expansion of solids and vapors, it was
possible to estimate the order of magnitude of the time interval between
the beginning and end of the nuclear chain reaction. Almost all the
technical difficulties of the project come from the extraordinary brevity of
this time interval.

No self-sustaining chain reaction could be produced in a block of pure
uranium metal, no matter how large, because of parasitic capture of the
neutrons by 11-238. This conclusion has been borne out by various theo-
retical calculations and also by direct experiment. For purposes of pro-
ducing a nonexplosive pile, the trick of using a lattice and a moderator
suffices — by reducing parasitic capture sufficiently. For purposes of pro-
ducing an explosive unit, however, it turns out that this process is un-
satisfactory on two counts. First, the thermal neutrons take so long (so
many micro-seconds) to act that only a feeble explosion would result.
Second, a pile is ordinarily far too big to be transported. It is therefore
necessary to cut down parasitic capture by removing the greater part of
the U-238 — or to use plutonium.

Naturally, these general principles — and others — had been well estab-
lished before the Los Alamos project was set up.

CRITICAL SIZE

The calculation of the critical size of a chain-reacting unit is a problem
that has already been discussed in connection with piles. Although the
calculation is simpler for a homogeneous metal unit than for a lattice,
inaccuracies remained in the course of the early work, both because of
lack of accurate knowledge of constants and because of mathematical
difficulties. For example, the scattering, fission, and absorption cross
sections of the nuclei involved all vary with neutron velocity. The details
of such variation were not known experimentally and were difficult to
take into account in making calculations. By the spring of 1943 several
estimates of critical size had been made using various methods of cal-
culation and using the best available nuclear constants, but the limits of
error remained large.

THE REFLECTOR OR TAMPER

In a uranium-graphite chain-reacting pile the critical size may be con-
siderably reduced by surrounding the pile with a layer of graphite, since
such an envelope "reflects" many neutrons back into the pile. A similar
envelope can be used to reduce the critical size of the bomb, but here the

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES 725

envelope has an additional role: its very inertia delays the expansion of
the reacting material. For this reason such an envelope is often called a
tamper. Use of a tamper clearly makes for a longer lasting, more energetic,
and more efficient explosion. The most effective tamper is the one having
the highest density; high tensile strength turns out to be unimportant.
It is a fortunate concidence that materials of high density are also excel-
lent as reflectors of neutrons.

EFFICIENCY

As has already been remarked, the bomb tends to fly to bits as the
reaction proceeds and this tends to stop the reaction. To calculate how
much the bomb has to expand before the reaction stops is relatively
simple. The calculation of how long this expansion takes and how far
the reaction goes in that time is much more difficult.

While the effect of a tamper is to increase the efficiency both by re-
flecting neutrons and by delaying the expansion of the bomb, the effect
on the efficiency is not as great as on the critical mass. The reason for this
is that the process of reflection is relatively time-consuming and may not
occur extensively before the chain reaction is terminated.

DETONATION AND ASSEMBLY

It is impossible to prevent a chain reaction from occurring when the
size exceeds the critical size. For there are always enough neutrons (from
cosmic rays, from spontaneous fission reactions, or from alpha-particle-
induced reactions in impurities) to initiate the chain. Thus until detona-
tion is desired, the bomb must consist of a number of separate pieces each
one of which is below the critical size either by reason of small size or
unfavorable shape. To produce detonation, the parts of the bomb must be
brought together rapidly. In the course of this assembly process the chain
reaction is likely to start — because of the presence of stray neutrons — before
the bomb has reached its most compact (most reactive) form. Thereupon
the explosion tends to prevent the bomb from reaching that most compact
form. Thus it may turn out that the explosion is so inefficient as to be
relatively useless. The problem, therefore, is twofold: (i) to reduce the
time of assembly to a minimum; and (2) to reduce the number of stray
(predetonation) neutrons to a minimum.

Some consideration was given to the danger of producing a "dud" or a
detonation so inefficient that even the bomb itself would not be completely
destroyed. This would, of course, present the enemy with a supply of
highly valuable material. . . .

726 ATOMIC FISSION

METHOD OF ASSEMBLY

Since estimates had been made of the speed that would bring together
subcritical masses of ^235 rapidly enough to avoid predetonation, a good
deal of thought had been given to practical methods of doing this. The
obvious method of very rapidly assembling an atomic bomb was to shoot
one part as a projectile in a gun against a second part as a target. The
projectile mass, projectile speed, and gun caliber required were not far
from the range of standard ordnance practice, but novel problems were
introduced by the importance of achieving sudden and perfect contact
between projectile and target, by the use of tampers, and by the require-
ment of portability. None of these technical problems had been studied to
any appreciable extent prior to the establishment of the Los Alamos
laboratory. . . .

In April, 1943, the available information of interest in connection with
the design of atomic bombs was preliminary and inaccurate. Further and
extensive theoretical work on critical size, efficiency, effect of tamper,
method of detonation, and effectiveness was urgently needed. Measure-
ments of the nuclear constants of U-235, plutonium, and tamper material
had to be extended and improved. In the cases of U-235 and plutonium,
tentative measurements had to be made using only minute quantities until
larger quantities became available.

Besides these problems in theoretical and experimental physics, there
was a host of chemical, metallurgical and technical problems that had
hardly been touched. Examples were the purification and fabrication of
U-235 and plutonium, and the fabrication of the tamper. Finally, there
were problems of instantaneous assembly of the bomb that were staggering
in their complexity.

The new laboratory improved the theoretical treatment of design and
performance problems, refined and extended the measurements of the
nuclear constants involved, developed methods of purifying the materials
to be used and, finally, designed and constructed operable atomic
bombs. . . . 7945

Nuclear Physics and Biology

ERNEST O, LAWRENCE

From Molecular Films, The Cyclotron, and the New Biology

ONE MIGHT ARGUE THAT PHYSICS PLAYS A COMPARA-
tively minor role in the life sciences, for a biologist is usually well-
trained in chemistry, while often his knowledge of physics amounts to
hardly more than what he learns incidentally in chemistry. He frequently
uses a microscope without a knowledge of optics and an X-ray machine
without an understanding of X-rays, and he is rarely curious about the
physics of living things.

Now there are signs that this picture is changing. There are indications
of a new epoch wherein the physicist is to close ranks with the chemist
and the biologist in the attack on problems of the life processes. I should
like to take this opportunity to discuss some of the recent notable advances
in nuclear physics that are finding wide application in the biological
sciences.

RADIOACTIVITY AND ATOMIC STRUCTURE

To introduce this subject, may I recall that Rutherford came forward in
1904 with a revolutionary hypothesis which reduced the complicated and
mysterious observations of radioactivity to simple order. He suggested that
not all of the atoms have existed for ages and will exist for all time, but
there are some atoms in nature that are energetically unstable and in the
course of time spontaneously blow up with explosive violence. These are
the natural radioactive substances, and the fragments given off in the
atomic explosions are the observed penetrating rays.

Nowadays the ideas of Rutherford and Bohr on the structure of atoms
are firmly established. There is an abundance of evidence that an atom
consists of a nebulous cloud of planetary electrons whirling about a very
dense sun — a positively charged nucleus— and that it is in the nucleus

727

728 ATOMIC FISSION

that the atomic explosions of radioactivity occur. The nucleus consists
of a closely packed group of neutrons and protons — elementary building
blocks of nature some two thousand times heavier than the electrons —
so that the nucleus contains practically all of the atom's matter and, indeed,
energy, because matter is one form of energy. The protons and neutrons
are visualized as extremely small, dense spheres of matter, so small indeed
that, if an atom were as large as a cathedral, on the same scale the nucleus
of the atom would be no larger than a fly! The protons carry positive
charges of electricity, and the number of protons in the nucleus equals
the number of planetary electrons because the atom as a whole is electri-
cally uncharged. In other words, the nucleus of an atom contains a number
of protons equal to its atomic number. Neutrons, on the other hand, are
electrically uncharged, and accordingly the number of neutrons in the
nucleus does not affect the planetary electrons. Varying the number of
neutrons in the nucleus only alters the weight of the atom. Thus it is that
we have isotopes of the elements — atoms of the same atomic number but
different weights.

NUCLEAR TRANSFORMATIONS

This is enough of an account of atomic structure for our present pur-
poses. We see that the age-old problem of alchemy — the transformation
of one element into another — is simply the problem of changing the
number of protons in the nucleus, while we may produce isotopes of the
elements by adding or subtracting neutrons. Because the nuclear particles
are so dense and so firmly packed together, the problem of bringing about
such nuclear transformations on an extensive scale was early recognized as
essentially a technical problem of producing swiftly moving nuclear par-
ticles— protons, neutrons, deuterons (heavy hydrogen nuclei) and alpha-
particles (helium nuclei) for bombardment purposes; for it appeared that
the only feasible way to knock in or knock out protons from atomic
nuclei was to smash them with projectiles of similar density. Accordingly,
laboratories over the world have been engaged in the development of
various sorts of atomic artillery. Among these the cyclotron has proved
to be particularly useful.

In the cyclotron ions are generated at the center of a vacuum chamber
between the poles of a large electromagnet and spiral on ever-widening
circular paths to the periphery under the combined action of a radio-
frequency oscillating electric field and a steady magnetic field. The cir-
culating ions resonate with the oscillating electric field, and the magnetic
field serves to balance the centrifugal force of the ions as they circulate.

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BICLOGY 729

In this way the medical cyclotron in Berkeley regularly produces 16 million
electron-volt deuterons or 32 million electron-volt alpha-particles.

Usually the beam of swiftly moving ions reaching the periphery of the
chamber is directed against a target, but on occasions the beam is allowed
to emerge into the air through a thin metal plate, and such a beam of 16
million electron-volt deuterons produces a lavender luminosity for a
distance of 4*72 feet. The beam in the air looks rather pretty, but its ap-
pearance hardly suggests its latent powers. However, some conception of
the energy in the beam is gained when a steel plate is placed in the path
of the beam, for it is immediately melted and cut through — a rather fancy
substitute for an oxyacetylene torch! A much more subtle danger, more-
over, lurks in it because, as the swiftly moving particles lose their energy,
they make nuclear collisions giving rise to penetrating nuclear radiations
— the gamma-rays and neutron rays, which like X-rays produce harmful
and even lethal effects in excessive doses. It is for this reason that the
cyclotron is so carefully surrounded by large masses of absorbing material
to protect the operators.

BIOLOGICAL ACTION OF NEUTRON RAYS

I suppose that almost as soon as he had discovered the neutron, Chad-
wick wondered about the biological action of neutron rays. I know that
in Berkeley, as soon as we observed that neutron rays were coming from
the cyclotron, in some abundance, we were curious as to what biological
effects they would produce — particularly on us! It was extraordinarily
fortunate that my brother, Dr. John Lawrence, was visiting our laboratory
the first summer we had neutron rays from the cyclotron in sufficient
intensities to warrant investigating the question. He gave up his vacation
to look into the matter, and in his first experiments he observed that
neutrons were exceedingly lethal.

Perhaps one might think it presumptuous to have an opinion on such
a matter before experimental observations were made, but we did suspect
that neutrons in comparison with X-rays would produce quite different
biological effects, for neutrons were known to produce a vastly different
distribution of ionization in matter. The X-ray ionization is produced by
secondary electrons, which are responsible for ... generally diffuse ioniza-
tion, while the neutrons produce ionization by making nuclear collisions
and causing nuclei to recoil. The resultant ionization paths of the recoil
nuclei are from a hundred to a thousand times more intense than those of
the secondary electrons. If one were to indulge in an analogy, one might
say that X-ray ionization resembles a San Francisco fog, while neutrons

730 ATOMIC FISSION

produce a shower of droplets, like a good New Brunswick rain! In par-
ticular, a simple calculation will show that X-rays would rarely ionize two
parts of a single protein molecule while neutrons will often produce
double ionization of such a large molecule. This fact alone would lead
one to suspect that neutrons might produce quite different biological
effects. A great deal of work has been done in recent years following the
first experiments of my brother, and there is an abundance of evidence
now that neutron rays do indeed produce qualitatively different biological
effects.

I should like to take this occasion to speak very briefly of some very
recent work along this line by Dr. Alfred Marshak. As is well known,
irradiation of cells with X-rays produces chromosome abnormalities, and
in particular it is observed that X-rays produce chromosome fragmenta-
tion. That is to say, when some irradiated cells go through mitosis, the
separating chromosomes are observed to split off one or more fragments
which are isolated from the cell nucleus. Dr. Marshak has studied this
X-ray fragmentation very extensively and has obtained significant and
fundamental information on the effects of ionization in cells. Recently
he has been studying the chromosome effects produced by neutrons. Such
curves give us a quantitative measure of the sensitivity of chromosomes to
X-rays. The steeper the slope the more susceptible are the chromosomes
to damage by X-rays. Similar curves are obtained when tissues are
treated with neutrons. The ratio of the slope for neutrons is a measure
of the relative efficiency of neutrons and X-rays in producing damage to
chromosomes. It has been found that this ratio is 2.5 for chromosomes
irradiated at the onset of the nuclear prophase. When irradiated in the
resting stage, however, the ratio rises as high as 6. Thus, neutrons are
more efficient than X-rays in producing damage to cells in the resting
stage. Neutrons, therefore, produce different qualitative as well as quan-
titative effects on chromosomes. Since many of the tumors which do not
respond to X-rays do not undergo mitosis frequently, i.e., have a much
greater proportion of their cells in the resting stage, it seems quite likely
from these results that such tumors may regress when treated with
neutrons even though they are resistant to X-rays.

NEUTRON THERAPY

This being the case, the clinician is immediately interested in the pos-
sibility that these qualitative differences might be used to advantage in
therapy — particularly in the treatment of cancer — for, as you know, there
are some tumors that respond very well to treatment with X-rays or

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY 731

radium. Some cancer cells seem to be killed more readily by the effects of
radiation than the normal cells, and such are called radiation sensitive cells.
There are unfortunately a large class of malignancies that are more or less
radiation resistant which do not respond satisfactorily to radiation therapy,
and it becomes a problem of great importance to determine whether at
least some of these tumors not successfully treated with X-rays might
respond to neutrons.

Although a considerable number of animal experiments on this point
were encouraging, the only real answer was to be found by trying neutron
therapy clinically, and, accordingly, a program of clinical investigation
was begun two years ago under the active direction of Dr. R. S. Stone,
professor of Radiology in the University of California Medical School,
who has had extensive experience with cancer therapy, using 200,000 volt
and 1,000,000 volt X-rays, and Dr. J. C. Larkin, who has devoted his full
time and efforts to all sides of the clinical problem.

For the clinical work it was necessary to have a well-defined beam of
neutrons in order to irradiate tumors in human beings locally just as is
done with X-rays. From our brief resume of nuclear structure, one can see
that neutrons are knocked out of nuclei under bombardment and it hap-
pens that a most prolific emission of neutrons is obtained from a target of
beryllium metal bombarded by deuterons in the cyclotron. The nuclear
reaction is one wherein the beryllium nucleus is transformed into a boron
nucleus by capture of the deuteron and emission of a neutron. The
neutrons come out in all directions from the beryllium target of the
cyclotron; and, in order to produce a beam, the target is surrounded by a
thick screen with a channel through it. The screen is about 4 feet thick
and consists of paraffin, boron and lead to absorb both neutrons and
gamma-rays from the cyclotron, except the radiation through the channel
from which a neutron beam of desired cross section emerges.

The orifice from which the neutron beam emerges is called the treat-
ment "port." It is in the wall of a treatment room, and, as far as the clini-
cian or patient is concerned, the arrangement for neutron therapy is just
the same as for deep X-ray therapy.

Of course preliminary to the beginning of clinical work a great many
animals were irradiated with the neutron beam in order to have further
biological measures of the dosage. For example, the minimum neutron
dosage which would remove hair from a rabbit was determined. The
sharp rectangular area of removed hair indicates very well the sharpness
of collimation of the neutron beam.

During the past two years a considerable number of cancer patients
have been treated with neutrons with encouraging results, and I want to

732 ATOMIC FISSION

show one case primarily as a matter o£ historical interest, for it is one of
the earliest cases. This patient had a carcinoma involving extensively the
jaw bone, and he had received no other treatment prior to the neutron
therapy — as contrasted to most of the early cases which had histories of
prior treatment with X-rays or radium. He was treated over a period of
about a month. Some weeks later the effects of the treatment began to ap-
pear. The skin showed a very pronounced reaction, and there was a sug-
gestion that the tumor itself was beginning to shrivel up. At least at this
stage we recognized that the neutrons had done something. Several
months later the skin had healed, and the tumor had evidently disappeared,
being replaced with scar tissue. Now, nearly a year later, there is no evi-
dence of the tumor, and the patient appears in good health. I know that
Dr. Stone, Dr. Larkin and my brother would not want me to give the
impression that this case is typical and that neutrons are producing miracu-
lous results. Similar results have occasionally been obtained with X-rays
and radium, and my medical colleagues are not ready as yet to come to
any conclusions as to the relative value of neutrons and X-rays in clinical
therapy; but it is proper for me to say that they are very much encouraged
and they think that there is every likelihood that after some years of work
they will find definitely that for some tumors, at least, neutron therapy
will be most effective. In my judgment neutron therapy will eventually
take an important place along with surgery, X-ray and radium in the
treatment of cancer.

SYNTHETIC RADIOACTIVE TRACER ATOMS

One of the early results of atomic bombardment was the discovery
that neutrons could be knocked in or knocked out of the nucleus to pro-
duce synthetic radioactive isotopes of the ordinary elements. Thus, for
example, the nucleus of the ordinary sodium atom contains n neutrons
and 12 protons, 23 particles in all, and so it is called sodium 23 (Na23) ;
and by bombardment it was found that a neutron could either be added
to make sodium 24 or subtracted to make sodium 22, both isotopic forms
not occurring in the natural state. The reason that these synthetic forms
are not found in nature is that they are energetically unstable. They are
radioactive and in the course of time blow up with explosive violence.
Sodium 24 has a half-life of 14.5 hours, i.e., it has an even chance of dis-
integrating in that time, turning into magnesium by the emission of an
electron. Sodium 22, on the other hand, has a half -life of 3 years and emits
positive electrons, transforming into stable neon 22.

These artificial radioactive isotopes of the elements are indistinguishable
from their ordinary stable relatives until the instant they manifest their

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY 733

radioactivity. This fact deserves emphasis, and it may be illustrated fur-
ther by the case of chlorine. Chlorine consists of a mixture of two isotopes,
76 per cent of Cl35 and 24 per cent of Cl37, resulting in a chemical atomic
weight of 35.46, which is the average weight of the mixture. By elaborate
technique, to be sure, it is possible to take advantage of the extremely
slight difference in chemical properties and bring about separation of
these isotopes, but in ordinary chemical, physical and biological processes,
the chlorine isotopes are indistinguishable and inseparable. There are
artificial radioactive isotopes Cl34 and Cl38, and these likewise are in-
distinguishable. In fact, Cl34 is more nearly identical in properties to the
natural isotope Cl35 than is the other natural isotope Cl37. And again I
would say that the radioactive characteristic of Cl34 becomes evident only
at the moment it blows up to turn into the neighbor-element sulfur.

In these radioactive transformations of the artificial radioactive isotopes,
the radiations given off are so energetic that radiations from individual
atoms can be detected with rugged and reliable instruments called Geiger
counters. Thus, radioactive isotopes can be admixed with ordinary chemi-
cals to serve as tracer elements in complicated chemical or biological proc-
esses. I should like to cite several recent researches illustrating the power
of this radioactive labelling technique.

RADIOACTIVE IODINE AND THE THYROID GLAND

As is well known, the thyroid gland takes up iodine in very large
quantities, and the abnormalities in function of the thyroid are responsible
for many human disorders. Doctors Joseph Hamilton and Mayo Soley
have been studying the thyroid function for some time now, using radio-
active iodine as an indicator. The general procedure is to include radio-
active iodine in the food of animals or human beings and to follow the
course of the iodine by measuring the radioactivity of dissected parts of
the animals or of samples of the body, particularly next to the thyroid.
In this way extensive studies of the uptake of iodine by the thyroid in
health and in disease have been made. Normally the thyroid takes up 3
or 4 per cent of the iodine taken in the food in the course of one or two
days. That to my layman's mind is a surprisingly large uptake, considering
how small a part of the body the thyroid gland is. In various abnormal
conditions, particularly hyperthyroidism, the uptake reaches the surpris-
ing value of 30 per cent, and I believe Dr. Hamilton has observed patients
in which the uptake has been as great as 70 per cent. It is quite outside
of my province to discuss what these observations mean, but I am sure
you will agree that they do illustrate the power of the tracer technique in
finding out what is going on in various physiological processes.

734 ATOMIC FISSION

BIOLOGICAL IDENTIFICATION OF ELEMENT 85

I should like to relate here a most interesting story now more than a
year old in connection with these thyroid studies. Doctors Dale Corson,
Kenneth MacKenzie and Emilio Segre at Berkeley had some evidence of
the production of element 85 by the bombardment of bismuth with 32
million volt alpha-particles from the cyclotron. As element 85 had here-
tofore not been discovered, its chemical properties were not known, but
from its place in the periodic table it was a reasonable likelihood that it
would prove to be a halogen similar to iodine; in fact, it had been given
the name eka-iodine. It occurred to Dr. Hamilton that, if the new radio-
active material which Doctors Corson and MacKenzie and Segre had
obtained was eka-iodine, it might be selectively taken up by the thyroid
like ordinary iodine. On this hunch, they gave the unknown new radio-
active substance to a patient having a nontoxic goiter, one of the kind
that takes up a great deal of iodine. They measured the radioactivity of
the thyroid several days later, and amazingly enough about 10 per cent
of the radioactive material was found in the thyroid gland. I suppose
Dr. Hamilton drew the conclusion that it was interesting that element
85 is taken up by the thyroid much as is iodine, but the physicists regarded
the experiment as a clinching biological proof or identification of element
85! In the meanwhile, the chemical properties of this element have been
worked out in our laboratory, and one more gap in the periodic table has
definitely been closed.

CALCIUM AND STRONTIUM METABOLISM

I should like now to describe briefly some very interesting unpublished
work of Dr. David Greenberg, who has been studying calcium and stron-
tium metabolism in animals. It had been shown earlier by Dr. Charles
Pecher that the metabolism of these two elements is surprisingly similar.
Dr. Pecher fed rats a diet containing strontium rather than calcium with
the result that strontium phosphate was laid down in the bones in place
of calcium phosphate. I understand that in this way some of his animals
had bones containing almost half and half strontium and calcium, and
yet the animals seemed to get along very nicely. In his studies of bone
metabolism Dr. Greenberg has been using more radioactive strontium
than radioactive calcium because the former is available in larger amounts,
as it is at the present time being produced in the medical cyclotron in
Berkeley in large quantities for therapeutic purposes.

One problem upon which he has shed interesting light is the role of
vitamin D in the cure of rickets. He fed a group of rats having rickets

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY 735

food containing radioactive strontium, and a similar group of animals
was given in addition vitamin D. Then he followed over the course of
time the excretion and retention of the strontium by observing the radio-
activity of the excreta and tissues of all the animals. The vitamin D animals
excreted less strontium in the feces while more appeared in the urine.
These observations show that one function of vitamin D is to promote the
absorption and retention of the strontium (and presumably calcium) from
the intestinal tract. Next Dr. Greenberg injected suitable solutions of
radioactive strontium into the blood stream of two groups of rachitic
animals — one group being fed vitamin D. Again the radioactivity of the
excreta was observed, and it was found that the feces showed slightly
more activity while the urine considerably less for the vitamin-D-fed
animals. These observations indicated that, beside promoting absorption
of the strontium from the intestine into the blood stream, vitamin D
also promotes some kind of a process of mineralization of bone, and this,
I am told, is a fundamental point in the matter.

Dr. Greenberg has been studying hyperthyroidism also. One of the
manifestations of hyperthyroidism is that the bones get soft, calcium
evidently being drained from the bones, resulting ultimately in such
weakening that fractures occur. Again he fed radioactive strontium to
two groups of animals, one group in the hyperthyroid condition, and the
other normal controls, and observed the radioactivity of the excreta. In
the feces of the two groups the differences were not very great, but in
the urine the hyperthyroid animals excreted about twice as much as the
controls, indicating that in the hyperthyroid condition the excretion from
the blood stream is much greater. Thus, the abnormality in the hyper-
thyroid animals is not a question of absorption but rather is one of ex-
cretion. Next the animals were injected with radioactive strontium so
that the question of absorption was not involved, and, as expected, it was
observed again that the hyperthyroid animals excreted in the urine about
twice as much as the controls. The conclusion to be reached from these
observations, according to Dr. Greenberg, is that the decalcification of the
bone in the hyperthyroid condition has to do with the greater metabolic
activity involving the greater rate of excretion of material which drains
away the calcium from the blood stream and thereby from the bone.

RADIO-AUTOGRAPHY

Another way of using the tracer elements in biological work is literally
more picturesque and in some respects is a much simpler technique. It
is called the method of radio-autography. Here some radioactive zinc was
placed in the nutrient solution of a tomato plant, and the uptake of the

736 ATOMIC FISSION

zinc in the tomato fruit was observed by slicing the fruit and placing
the slides against a photographic plate. The radioactivity produced a picture
of the distribution of the accumulated labelled zinc throughout the fruit.
My colleagues in plant nutrition in Berkeley, Professor J. R. Hoagland,
Dr. Perry Stout and others, have been studying the distribution of zinc
in tomatoes in this way, following this phenomenon all of the way from
the earliest stages of formation of the fruit to maturity. The extent of my
knowledge of this subject is indicated by the fact that it was complete news
to me that zinc is an essential element in tomatoes! It is present in only
a few parts in a million.

Another interesting radio-autograph resulted from a section of a can-
cerous thyroid gland taken from a patient who had been given radioactive
iodine the day before. The microscopic section was placed against a photo-
graphic plate, and the developed image showed where the radioactive
iodine was deposited in the thyroid tissue. The magnification of the image
was so great that the individual photographic grains could be seen, and
there was enough detail to make it evident that the iodine is not deposited
in the cancerous tissue but is found only in the normal thyroid material.
I shall not attempt to discuss the interesting information along this line
that my colleagues Doctors J. G. Hamilton and M. H. Soley have obtained
in this way.

Another interesting example is that of Dr. R. Craig, who has been study-
ing the physiology and metabolism of insects. I think you will agree that
a detailed study of the physiology and metabolism of insects would prob-
ably be a very difficult technique, but Dr. Craig has been able to get much
useful information along this line very easily by radio-autographs.

Radio-autographs of the distribution of labelled phosphorus and stron-
tium show that both of these elements are deposited largely in the skele-
tal structure, the phosphorus being more generally distributed in the bone
marrow and soft tissues while the strontium was deposited more selec-
tively in the bone structure.

RADIOPHOSPHORUS

Leukemia is a disease of the white blood cells wherein the white cells
multiply excessively, ultimately crowding out the red cells and producing
an anemia, and so on to a fatal result. One treatment of the disease is to
irradiate the whole body or certain parts of the body, such as the spleen,
with X-rays. Such treatments frequently cause the white count to decrease
practically to normal and temporarily produce a very beneficial result,
but the X-ray treatment is only of temporary benefit, for ultimately the
disease reaches a stage wherein it is not affected by such therapy. It oc*

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY 737

curred to my brother, Dr. John Lawrence, that, since phosphorus is de-
posited in the bones and bone marrow, where the white blood cells are
formed, radioactive phosphorus might be especially effective for the
treatment of leukemia. If whole body irradiation with X-rays produced
a beneficial result, it might be that much better results would be obtained
by the localized ionization produced by the radioactivity of the phosphorus
at the site of the disease in the bone marrow.

Accordingly, Dr. Lawrence looked into the matter, first of all by carry-
ing out some experiments with mice having the disease. He fed animals
radioactive phosphorus and observed the excretion and distribution of the
phosphorus over the animals, finding among other things, that leukemic
cells have an extraordinarily great appetite for phosphorus, for those tissues
in which the leukemic cells had infiltrated were found to be much more
radioactive than other tissues. These interesting observations with the
animals gave all the more reason for hopefulness that the radioactive
phosphorus would be useful clinically in leukemia.

Dr. Lawrence has in the past two years treated a considerable number
of leukemia patients with radioactive phosphorus and has obtained very
interesting results. A typical case is that of a patient who had a white blood
count of some 200,000. Given successive small doses of radioactive phos-
phorus over a period of several months, the white count was brought down
to normal, around 10,000, after which the disease could no longer be
diagnosed in the patient. This example is by no means an exception but
is rather typical of the results obtained with the radioactive phosphorus.
Since the treatments have been carried on hardly more than two years,
it is too early to evaluate the ultimate usefulness of this new therapy.
However, I am sure my brother would agree with the statement that
radioactive phosphorus therapy gives the patient many more comfortable
days of life than other methods of treatment, but it is too early to say
whether complete cures will be effected.

RADIOACTIVE STRONTIUM AND OSTEOGENIC TUMORS

The fact that strontium is deposited in the hard structure of the bone
suggested to Dr. Pecher that osteogenic tumors might have a great avidity
for radioactive strontium, in which event the material might be effective
in the treatment of this class of malignancies. For about a year now in our
laboratory several patients having generalized bone metastases have been
given radio-strontium with encouraging results — relief of pain and general
improvement of clinical condition.

It is not appropriate here to go into this subject extensively, but I should
like to describe some very recent observations he has made on the deposi-

738 ATOMIC FISSION

tion of radioactive strontium in an osteogenic sarcoma. Several months
ago a young boy with an advanced case of osteogenic sarcoma in his leg
came to the clinic, and he was fed some radioactive strontium in his food
several days before it was planned to amputate his leg. The amputated
leg was X-rayed and also sectioned and placed against a photographic
plate in order to get a radio-autograph of the strontium distribution. It
is seen that there is a surprisingly large uptake of the strontium in the
osteogenic tumor. In another patient who had an osteogenic sarcoma is
seen the isolated nodule of sarcoma, which was extremely radioactive
following the administration of radio-strontium. The radioactivity of
various tissues was measured, and it was found that the uptake of the
strontium in the bone was of the order of magnitude of a hundred times
that of the soft tissue, and in the osteogenic sarcoma the uptake was
roughly five times greater than that of the bone. Thus was observed an
extraordinarily selective deposition of the radioactivity in the tumor,
indicating that we may have here a very good means of treating this
disease. I am told that the treatment of these bone tumors with strontium
is going forward clinically with encouraging results but again it is too
early to draw any broad conclusions.

RADIOACTIVE CARBON AND PHOTOSYNTHESIS

The mechanism of the process whereby green plants utilize solar energy
to photosynthesize organic compounds from carbon dioxide and water
is little understood although it has been the subject of study by scores
of eminent scientists for centuries. In this process the solar energy is
stored as carbohydrate, protein, etc., and this chemical fuel is the source
of energy for the non-photosynthetic systems. In fact, the ability to reduce
carbon dioxide and use it as the only source for the synthesis of carbon
compounds has provided a basis for the classification of all living systems
into "autotrophes" — systems capable of existing entirely on carbon
dioxide — and "heterotrophes" — systems requiring more elaborate foods.

A fundamental difficulty in studying the plant photosynthesis is the
inability of the chemist to distinguish the carbon entering the system in
the primary process from the carbon already present. The use of a radio-
active labelled carbon obviates this difficulty and renders it possible to
trace the various chemical reactions in which carbon dioxide enters in
photosynthesis. My colleagues, Dr. S. Ruben and Dr. Martin Kamen (who
have educated me on this subject), have made a very significant start in
this direction, using a rather short-lived radioactive isotope of carbon,
C11 (half-life 21 minutes). While the work is still very much in its in-
fancy, it already appears that the guesses made with regard to the

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY 739

mechanism of photosynthesis in the past are far from correct. Thus, it has
been supposed that likely intermediates in the reactions whereby carbon
dioxide finally is synthesized into carbon chains are formaldehyde, simple
organic acids, such as oxalic acid, citric acid, etc. However, none of the
simple low molecular weight compounds have been found to contain
any labelled carbon. In fact, the first substance detected with activity
is at least ten times heavier than the intermediates mentioned.

By means of the labelling technique, it has been possible to observe that
carbon dioxide can be incorporated reversibly in an exchange reaction with
a compound present in the cell in the absence of light, and the evidence in-
dicates this compound to be of high molecular weight and to contain
carbon, hydrogen and oxygen groupings typical of organic acids. These
observations fit in well with others made by investigations other than
the labelling technique, and it is not too much to hope that progress in
understanding the essential mechanism of photosynthesis will be more
rapid than it has been.

With regard to the heterotrophes, one ordinarily does not consider
that carbon dioxide fulfills the role of a metabolite in such systems. Never-
theless, when a typical heterotrophic system, such as yeast, is allowed to
carry on fermentation in the presence of labelled carbon dioxide, much
active carbon is found fixed or reduced and incorporated in cellular
organic compounds. A very simple case may be cited. There exists species
of bacteria which ferment alcohol, producing methane, water and carbon
dioxide. Thus.

4CH3OH -» CO2 + 3CH4 + 2H2O

In this process, it has been suggested that methane may originate not from
alcohol but from carbon dioxide despite the fact that carbon dioxide is
produced. This point has been investigated using labelled carbon, and
indeed it has been found that a large fraction, if not all, of the methane
produced originates from the carbon dioxide and not the alcohol. In still
another species of bacteria which produce carbon dioxide, ammonia and
acetic acid from anaerobic fermentation of uric acid, the synthesis from
carbon dioxide of acetic acid, CHsCOOH with both carbons labelled has
been observed. Here a two-carbon compound has been made from carbon
dioxide by a system ordinarily supposed incapable of synthesizing a
carbon chain from carbon dioxide. Many more such systems have been
studied, and it now appears that carbon dioxide may be used specifically
as a source of carbon in the synthesis of the organic compounds by both
autotrophes and heterotrophes. Such a conclusion could not have been
reached with many of these systems because the entry of the carbon dioxide

740 ATOMIC FISSION

was masked by the excretion of carbon dioxide from the oxidation of the
organic substances supplying the energy for the metabolic process. It
must be emphasized that the pickup of labelled carbon dioxide in these
systems may be due entirely to simple exchange processes, but the evi-
dence from other types of experiments has been held to indicate that
carbon dioxide plays the role of a specific metabolite, and much that is
obscure in present knowledge of fermentation processes is clarified if the
concept of utilization of carbon dioxide by heterotrophes is employed.

THE GIANT CYCLOTRON

These examples of applications of recent discoveries in the field of
nuclear physics to biological problems, I trust, will convey not only an
appreciation of the usefulness of these new techniques in solving problems
of the life sciences but also will indicate something of the richness of the
phenomena in the nucleus brought to light by bombarding atoms with
atomic projectiles of millions of electron-volts of energy. As the energy
of the bombarding particles has been increased by progressively improving
the cyclotron, the range of the observed nuclear phenomena has even
more rapidly increased, urging us on to higher energies. I should like to
close this discussion with brief reference to the giant cyclotron now under
construction, thanks to a generous grant from the Rockefeller Founda-
tion, with which it is hoped to produce atomic projectiles of energies of
a hundred million electron-volts or more. I am sure that this great machine
will open new vistas, that it will bring exciting new pioneer days of dis-
covery. What these will be only the future can tell!

Almighty Atom

A JOURNALIST SPECULATES

JOHN J. O'NEILL

From the book Almighty Atom

MAN HAS HERETOFORE BEEN ENTIRELY DEPENDENT
upon the sun for all of the energy which made life itself and civili-
zation possible. Atomic energy has released man from dependence on
the sun — he has graduated from being a citizen of the solar system and is
now a citizen of the cosmos, because uranium and the heavyweight
elements are not created in the sun but are an inheritance from the original
creative process of the great cosmos, or multiverse.

Atomic energy is such a versatile agent that today it would require a
superhuman imagination to glimpse the wide variety of uses to which
it may be put in the industrial world. . . .

Practically all of the coal we produce is used as fuel. Some of the bitumi-
nous coal is treated first to obtain gas, which is used as a fuel, or tar, from
which chemical products are extracted, and the residue, coke, is then
used as a fuel. The two principal purposes for which coal is burned as a
fuel are to heat buildings, and to produce mechanical and electric power.
For all of these purposes, except the production of coal-tar chemicals,
another fuel would serve equally well.

Heating our homes with atomic energy materials should be, from an
engineering viewpoint, a simple project; one which could be acomplished
at very low cost for the original installation, and maintained thereafter
at almost no cost. We may, however, find it wise to use atomic energy in
a less direct fashion.

If your home needs about 8 tons of coal per year for heating, and heating
is required on only 225 days a year, then the average daily consumption
of coal would be 65 pounds. The number of ergs (units of energy) in this
quantity of coal is 9,000,000,000,000,000.

One pound of uranium 235 in the atomic energy process will yield
347,746,000,000,000,000,000 ergs. Simple arithmetic will show that this

741

742 ATOMIC FISSION

number of ergs will supply the energy required for a period of 38,640
days. Since the heat is required only 225 days during the year, the one
pound of uranium will heat the house for 171 years and 8 months.

Uranium is a very heavy element, about 13 times as heavy as water. A
piece of the metal one inch square and two inches long would weigh
one pound. This is the size of the piece of fuel that would heat a house
for one-and-three-quarter centuries, giving off energy equal to that from
1,368 tons of coal.

Now we can consider the difficulties which the use of atomic energy
in the home presents. When the uranium atom is split, it emits a shower
of neutrons only a small percentage of which are required for the chain-
reaction process, and the remainder escape at high speed. In addition it
gives off a very intense form of radiation much more penetrating than
the most powerful X-rays. These rays will pass through the densest metals
in great thicknesses.

It will be necessary to provide protection against both the neutrons and
the rays. It may be possible, by the use of metal screens, to reduce the
intensity of both to such a low degree that they would be no source of
danger. We may find it desirable to bury our furnaces in the ground
and use a thick layer of earth as a protecting screen.

The more likely solution will be that we will heat our homes by
electricity generated by atomic energy in central powerhouses.

With the coming of atomic energy, coal faces serious competition, so
serious that its usefulness as a fuel and a source of heat appears to be ap-
proaching an early end. Uranium 235 as a fuel source will yield 2,500,000
times as much heat as an equal weight of coal. It does not appear possible
for any commodity to survive under such tremendous competition. The
cost factor is at the present time the governing element, but it can be as-
sumed that even under the most rigidly conservative estimates, on a com-
mercial basis, coal will be at least 10 times and probably 100 or 1,000 times
more expensive t;han atomic-energy sources of fuel. . . .

As soon as a small atomic-energy power unit that can replace the auto-
mobile engine is made available it will mark the beginning of the end of
the demand for approximately 20,000,000,000 gallons of gasoline that are
now consumed annually, and which have a value of about $1,150,000,000.

More than 95 per cent of the total petroleum production is used as
automotive or heating fuel. About three per cent becomes lubricating oil,
and the remainder is converted into greases, waxes and asphalts. (1940
data.)

Since the heat and fuel functions of petroleum can be fulfilled even

ALMIGHTY ATOM 743

better by atomic energy, it would appear as if the petroleum industry as
a fuel-producer faces almost total extinction from the competition of
atomic energy, in the same way as the coal industry. As the situation stands
at present that would be the inevitable result, but there are very extensive
opportunities for the use of petroleum as a chemical raw material. . . .

The chief effect on the petroleum industry will come when atomic-
energy sources are installed in automobiles. This will not come immedi-
ately, but the problems involved should be solved on a practical commer-
cial basis within the next decade — perhaps within the next five years. . . .

An automobile with a built-in power supply that will last a lifetime—
that is what atomic energy promises. Drive the car as long as it holds
together and you will never have to stop for refueling. It will have no
gasoline tank, or fuel tank of any kind. The upkeep, apart from fuel will
be less. The manufacturers will undoubtedly find a way to build the cars
so that they will last many times as long as the present cars, an accomplish-
ment that is well within the range of their technical abilities.

An outlook such as this should bode only well for the automobile-
manufacturing industry, but the gasoline-selling service station will dis-
appear, although there will still be need for "lubritoriums" and, to a
limited extent, for repair stations. The public will have more leisure time
and will undoubtedly spend much more of it on the road, so that some
of the gasoline stations can be utilized for services of other kinds. . . .

Production of the atomic-energy type of motor car will not entail any
very difficult problems for the automobile manufacturers. They are fa-
miliar with such large tasks as completely retooling their factories for
the manufacture of new models each year. Manufacturing the atomic-
energy car may be a simpler task than manufacturing the gas-engined
car, but the engineering and designing task may be more difficult and re-
quire a great deal of research and experimental work. . . .

In spite of the fact that the atomic-energy car will have a lifetime supply
of fuel built into it at the factory, there is a reasonable expectation that the
cost of this car, when the simplification of existing models is taken into
account, will be approximately the same as that of present-day cars — or
in other words, a lifetime supply of fuel will cost nothing. The automobile
manufacturers may decide to design a lifetime car, too.

It is a little early to determine what will be the nature of the power
plant through which the atomic energy will be used, but there are three
general possibilities. Most of the present types of engines, steam, oil and
gasoline, are so inefficient in the conversion of the fuel energy into me-
chanical energy that it has been necessary to employ only the types best

744 ATOMIC FISSION

adapted to particular uses in order to keep purchase and operating costs
as low as possible. In atomic-energy systems the supply of energy is so
great that it will not be necessary to make economy of operation the
dominating factor. It may be found, for example, in our early experience
with atomic-energy fuels, that a plant capable of delivering thousands of
horsepower is much more efficient, per pound, than one delivering fifty
horsepower. This, however, would not militate against the use of the
smaller-sized plants in motor cars.

It will be recalled that in the hypothetical direct application of uranium
235 to the production of steam heat to eliminate the use of coal or oil fuel,
the water from which the steam was obtained played an important part in
the atomic-energy process. It slowed down the neutrons ejected from the
exploding atoms so they could be sent back to smash more uranium atoms
and make the process a continuous one. The heat produced in the slow-
ing-down process changed the water to steam at a constant pressure in
a self-controlling process. Additional energy was contained in the radia-
tions from the exploding atoms and in the movement of the two large
fragments into which the uranium atom was split.

The steam-producing process is the one most likely to be used in the
atomic-energy automobile. . . .

But it is likely that there will be developments in the study of other
elements than uranium as sources of atomic energy, and these may result
in different methods of application. It is within the realm of possibilities
that a method of direct production of electricity from fundamental particles
of matter will be evolved, in which case the driving power for automobiles
will be applied through electric motors.

The atomic-energy automobile will be a much neater car, under the
hood, than present types of cars. With the exception of the radiator in the
model in which a radiator will be employed for condensing steam, the
entire power plant can be enclosed in an airtight compartment, since air
will not be required in any part of the energy processes. It will be a very
quiet car since there will be no roaring carburetor, no valve clicks, no
explosions through the exhaust to be smothered in a noisy muffler. . . .

Such cars will be easy to operate. The equivalent of our present gas foot
pedal, the brake pedal and the steering wheel will be the only operating
mechanisms. The only instruments on the dashboard will be a speedometer,
a thermometer and an oil-pressure gage. When touring in such a car, it
will never be necessary to stop except for the personal needs of the
passengers. There will be less fatigue for the driver.

The atomic-energy car is not, of course, without problems. One of them
is analogous fo the exhaust gas in the present type of engine. This is the

ALMIGHTY ATOM 745

problem that is likely to cause most delay in the advent of the new-age car.
One of the products of the atom-smashing process is a supply of neutrons
that is given off when the uranium atom is split. Neutrons, as the reader
will have gathered, are peculiar particles. They have the ability to pass
through most kinds of dense matter as easily as light passes through a
window pane. For the same reason that it would be dangerous to be
continuously exposed to super-powerful X-rays, it would be dangerous for
the body to be continuously bombarded by neutrons which would be pro-
duced inside the engine. This exposure of persons in an atomic-energy
autojnobile to the neutron showers coming out of the motors would take
place if there were no means of shielding them from the particles.

Since neutrons pass through iron and lead as easily as water through
a coarse screen, it would seem that shutting them off would be a difficult
task. Such is not the case, however. Just as glass is transparent to light and
metals are opaque to it, so there are materials which are opaque to
neutrons. Cadmium, a metal related to zinc, and dysprosium, one of the
rare-earth metals, are very opaque to them; and substances containing a
large percentage of hydrogen, such as water, oil and paraffine, act as effec-
tive neutron screens. The heavy kind of uranium, the isotope with an
atomic weight of 238, will shut off a stream of neutrons by absorbing
them. While it is doing this it is being changed from an inert substance
into an atomic-energy substance, and a practical use may be made of this
situation. By encasing the atomic-energy motor in a covering of uranium
238, the neutrons would be confined within it and the passengers would
thereby be protected. This 238 shield would, in turn, become a source
of atomic energy. The shield would be solid and processed to supply the
power source for new cars. Determining the degree of protection re-
quired and obtained under various conditions will take time. . . .

Railroads will be affected both favorably and unfavorably by the com-
ing of atom-energy sources of power. This refers to railroads as they
stand now and for an interim period during which an entirely new type
of transportation may be introduced. The present railroad systems will
then become an auxiliary of the new system of express transportation
and in their present state they may be too obsolescent to participate in
the new development without complete rebuilding.

The railroads will receive from atomic energy the benefit of a simplified
power system for driving their rolling stock and a saving in the cost of
fuel. Many of them will be adversely affected, to a very serious extent, by
the loss of their coal-hauling business. . . .

Another even more tremendous situation faces the railroads, one far

746 ATOMIC FISSION

more important than their financial crisis. Transportation in the form
in which it is provided by the railroads will become obsolete. A new
transportation system, designed on an entirely new basis, to meet the
requirements of a new age must be provided.

In the days to come it will be necessary to have real rapid transporta-
tion on a nationwide basis so that any two points in the country will
not be further apart in travel time than any two points in New York
City are separated in travel time. In other words, the Atlantic coast
must not be further than one hour of travel time from the Pacific. It is
not impossible to achieve this travel miracle. Atomic energy brings it
within the realm of entirely practical projects.

The plan for such a system was visualized a generation ago by Robert
Hutchings Goddard, in 1910, while he was still a student in Clark
University. He proposed that large vacuum tubes be constructed connect-
ing the many cities of the country, and that the cars be suspended by
electromagnetic means and be propelled by rocket motors. Very high
speeds would be attainable within these tubes. The travel time from Bos-
ton to New York, he estimated, would be ten minutes.

Serious thought has been given to this project by many great minds.
Dr. Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize winner, of the General Electric
Laboratories, has given the matter serious consideration. One of the
features of the General Electric Company's exhibit at the New York
World's Fair was a metal object suspended in midair without visible
support of any kind. It leaked out only a short time ago what was behind
this exhibit. Dr. Langmuir had got into a discussion with fellow-scientists
concerning the feasibility of providing magnetic suspension for a moving
body, such as a car, moving through a vacuum tube such as Goddard
described; and Langmuir designed the exhibit to show that the plan was
practicable.

Tremendous engineering difficulties are involved in such a project, he
declares: but in time all of them could be solved. At the 1944 Herald
Tribune Forum, Dr. Langmuir declared that in the post-war period it
would be necessary to tackle gigantic projects, and he suggested that a
new transportation system based on the Goddard principle might well
be one of them.

Under such a plan every principal city in the country would be con-
nected by vacuum tubes. It would be possible to attain extremely high
velocities in such a tube because the vacuum would eliminate air friction;
and due to the fact that the vehicle was suspended in space by magnetic
means, there would be no sliding or rolling friction. The car would be

ALMIGHTY ATOM 747

able to move almost as freely as if it were in interplanetary space.
Velocities of 10,000 miles per hour or higher could be attained, if desired.

If the system were employed for freight or mail transportation, very
high velocities could be used; the only limit would be the strength of the
car and the materials transported. There would, however, be no strain
whatever associated with traveling 10,000 or 50,000 miles per hour. We
are traveling through space on the earth at a rate of more than 60,000
miles per hour, but because it is a steady motion we are entirely un-
conscious of it.

Difficulties arise only with change of speed. In the vacuum-tube system
we will encounter the problem of acceleration and deceleration, or speed-
ing up and slowing down. As we speed up in a forward direction we
have the experience of a gravitational pull from behind, owing to the
inertia of our bodies. When an elevator starts going up rapidly we feel
a stronger pressure on our feet, as if our weight was increased; and
when we start coming down in the elevator we feel a sense of lightness
because the weight factor is acting in the opposite direction. If a car in
which we are riding moves backward rapidly, we slide forward in our
seats. These are the effects of a change in motion. We can stand a large
gravitational pull in any direction without encountering difficulties. The
safe limits, however, remain to be determined. This limit will determine
the rate at which we can speed up and slow down our vacuum cars. . . .

The first major application of atomic energy from which the public
will receive direct benefits will be its use for the generation of electricity.
This may continue to be its major use. The electric light and power com-
panies will there be presented with a gigantic opportunity to render an
unprecedented service on a national scale, and will also carry the burden
of an equally tremendous responsibility for making atomic energy avail-
able to the people in a way in which it can be applied for maximum
human welfare as a primary purpose.

Because atomic energy will reach the people in the form of electricity
and there will be vast increases in the amounts of electric current used,
the manufacturers of electrical devices will experience the opportunity
and responsibility for making available, in greatly increased number and
kinds, present and new forms of electrical devices.

The complexity of the situation that must be faced is indicated by just
one item. In the atomic-energy era the railroads are more likely to go on
an electric basis of operation than to use isolated power plants in locomo-
tives. If this happens, the railroads will become one of the largest users
of electricity generated from atomic energy. This will create a very

748 ATOMIC FISSION

direct linkage between the transportation system and the electric-power
industry. The transportation system may find itself organized so that it
includes not only railroads and airplane lines but even the production
of passenger automobiles and trucks using atomic energy. . . .

There is no certainty that uranium will be the atomic-energy material
that will be used commercially, but in the absence of any greater certainty
it can be discussed as the likely material. It was previously mentioned that
uranium is about as plentiful as copper, and that if it is used extensively
its cost could be reduced to a possible 25 cents per pound. The raw
uranium, however, is not available as an energy source. It is necessary
to process it in order to convert it to a usable form. There are two pos-
sible processes, as previously described, one to extract the rare active
235 isotope which occurs to about three-quarters of one per cent in the
commercial metal, and the other to transform the 238 isotope, which
comprises 99.25 per cent of the metal, into the active atomic-energy
isotope 239.

No data are yet available as to the relative costs. It seems likely, how-
ever, that the process of activating the 238 isotope by bombarding it
with neutrons is the more practical and perhaps the cheaper method. It
should be possible to bombard the combination of the two isotopes as they
occur in the native metal, and use the supply of neutrons given off by
splitting the 235 atom to bombard the 238 atoms and convert them to
isotope 239. Even if all the neutrons from the 235 atoms were utilized
efficiently, however, they would not be adequate in number for the full
conversion of the 238 isotope.

The largest number of neutrons that could be expected to come out of
a 235 split would be 15, but perhaps it would be better to figure on 10.
There are, however, about 125 of the 238 atoms to i of the 235 atoms
in the native metal, so that only 10 per cent of the 238 atoms would
be transformed in this way. The 239 atoms formed, however, could be
further bombarded and split to give off another 10-fold increase in
neutrons, and these could be used to bring about another 10-fold increase
in the transformation of the remaining 238 atoms into 239. In this way
the normal uranium metal could be induced to transform itself auto-
matically into a tenfold richer source of atomic-energy material.

Once started, this process could be expected to supply the energy needed
for its operation. If it worked with loo-per-cent efficiency, a sacrifice of
10 per cent of the uranium metal would cause the remaining 90 per cent
to be changed into a usable atomic-energy source. No such efficiency
would be achieved and in practice the reverse ratio would probably be
found to prevail; that is, 90 per cent of the metal would be sacrificed to

ALMIGHTY ATOM 749

produce 10 per cent of atom-energy material. Just considering material
alone and neglecting other costs, that would be equivalent to raising
the cost of the atomic-energy material from 25 cents per pound to $2.50
per pound. It is likely that other costs would raise the price to nearer $25
or $50 per pound. This allows a generous leeway, perhaps much more
generous than experience will indicate is necessary.

There are cheaper sources of neutrons. Lithium, a substance plentiful
in all salt waters and present in a number of minerals; and beryllium,
a metal now used in hardening copper, can also be used to provide
generous supplies of neutrons; and these can be obtained at a reasonably
low cost. . . .

One of the first changes in the home would be to electric cooking, and
then to heating the home by electricity, as well as air conditioning it.
Scores of other uses not now practicable because of cost consideration would
be developed.

A low average cost of gas for cooking in the home is $2.50 per month
per family, or about $30 per year. When electricity is used for cooking
with no increase in the cost of current, this expense will be saved. The
integrated effect of this change will be the elimination of gas as fuel. Gas
companies go the way of the coal companies.

Heating the home by electricity will be a quickly adopted innovation,
eliminating coal, oil and gas as fuels. The average home requires about
eight tons of coal, or the equivalent in oil, for heating during the cold
months. If we allow a low figure of $12.50 per ton as the average coal
cost, then the use of electricity will result in a saving of $100 a year on
this item.

Air conditioning will be adopted generally. If used under present condi-
tions, a fair minimum cost would be $25 a year.

In the colder sections we may find electricity used to replace snow
shoveling. Electrically heated sidewalks will melt the snow.

Industry would have virtually unlimited energy available with which
to engage in economic production plans made practicable by the elimina-
tion of power costs. Farms also would become large users of electricity.

Ships and heavy airplanes are likely to be early beneficiaries of atomic
energy. The heavy metal screens necessary to afford protection against
the intense radiation that comes from the atomic-energy process is the
chief obstacle to the use of this source of power in smaller craft. Ships
will be able to use water as a partial screening substance, and can afford
to use a thick metal false bottom as an additional screen below which the
atomic energy power plant will be installed. On large airplanes it will

750 ATOMIC FISSION

only be necessary to provide protection in the direction in which the
passengers and operating crews will be located, as little damage is likely
to be done by airplanes flying a mile or two high.

Airplanes powered with atomic-energy sources may use steam-power
plants instead of the present gasoline-fueled type of engines. The power-to-
weight ratio of the power plant is likely to be increased many fold over
the present figures, so that large planes with large capacity for payload
can be placed in operation.

The cruising range of such airplanes will be unlimited. As far as fuel
is concerned they could stay in the air indefinitely. A non-stop flight
around the world would be no problem at all for them. With jet-propul-
sion engines they could negotiate high-altitude, high-speed flying, so
that not only would long non-stop flights be practicable but they would,
in addition, be made at very high speeds.

Smaller airplanes will have to await further developments in more
efficient screening before atomic-energy power plants are available to them.
It is likely that this problem will be solved first for automobiles, and
that as soon as they become practicable the atomic-energy light airplane
will also become available. . . .

The cruising range of ships will be unlimited. Coaling and fueling
stations will become obsolete. The control of the oceans by those coun-
tries which maintain refueling stations at strategic points will be a thing
of the past. Ships with ample capacity for storage and preservation of
food for crew and passengers will be independent of today's ports of call.
The oceans will become entirely free. . . .

Atomic energy, with the tremendous amount of power it releases from
a small amount of material, makes it possible likewise to construct rockets
of unlimited range. Problems no greater than those which have been
solved during the past four years await the application of our genius,
and then we will be able to shoot a rocket from anywhere in the United
States and have it land within a relatively small circle surrounding
any selected spot anywhere on the surface of the earth.

Vast readjustments to our financial structure will result from the advent
of atomic energy, and extremely important effects will be felt from the
threat — or promise, depending on the viewpoint — of the application of
this new agency long before it is ready for commercial use. . . .

All of man's freedoms have come into existence only as a result of
his conquest of increasing sources of power beyond that in his own
muscles. Every civil, political and economic liberty stems from this primary
source of all liberties. With atomic energy, man can create a new world

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 751

in which we are entirely freed from the domination of our environment,
in which all of our wants will be generously supplied and every useful
luxury made available.

Probably the greatest responsibility that rests upon the people of the
United States today is to determine just how atomic energy shall be ad-
ministered for the creation of universal human welfare. This calls for
a grandiose type of planning, compared to what we have been doing in
the past; it calls for planning on a gigantic scale and a gargantuan motif
for our works. The critical element in the atomic-energy age will be
man himself. Will he measure up to the possibilities of the tremendous
source of power now placed in his hands ? 1945

The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for
International Relations

JACOB VINER

IN HIS MESSAGE TO CONGRESS OF OCTOBER 3, 1945
President Truman stated that: "In international relations as in domestic
affairs, the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolu-
tionary to consider in the framework of old ideas." Beyond a few facts
and a few surmises about the military effectiveness and the cost of atomic
bombs, however, I unfortunately have no materials to work with except
a framework of old ideas, some of them centuries old, with respect to
the inherent character of international relations. I suspect that practically
every non-scientist is in substantially the same predicament, except that
many are unfamiliar even with the old ideas about the character of inter-
national relations.

I am fully aware that I cannot tell this audience anything about the
nature of the atomic bomb as a military weapon which it does not know
more fully and more accurately than I do. But I want to disclose the
atomic-bomb premises upon which my argument is based so that if my

752 ATOMIC FISSION

information is incorrect in any vital respect you will be in a position to
discount appropriately the argument I based upon it.

A single atomic bomb can reduce a city and its population to dust. A
single airplane can carry the bomb. A single person can carry the ex-
plosive ingredients of the bomb, and it can be deposited at an appropriate
spot and detonated at an appropriate time by pressing a button or
setting a time-clock. The bomb has a minimum size, and in this size
it is, and will remain, too expensive — or too scarce, whether expensive or
not — to be used against minor targets. Its targets, therefore, must be pri-
marily cities, and its military effectiveness must reside primarily in its
capacity to destroy urban population and productive facilities. Under
atomic bomb warfare, the soldier in the army would be safer than his
wife and children in their urban home.

Secrecy as to the fundamental scientific principles underlying the
atomic bomb is already non-existent. Secrecy as to manufacturing know-
how is probably already less than perfect and can at the most delay the
manufacturer of such bombs for other countries by only a few years.
The atomic bomb is susceptible of further improvement. But, even if our
superior supply of scientists, of industrial resources, and of industrial tech-
nique could be relied upon to keep us always ahead of other countries
in the quality of the national brand of bombs, this would probably
have little strategic significance. The atomic bomb, unlike battleships,
artillery, airplanes, and soldiers, is not an effective weapon against its
own kind. A superior bomb cannot neutralize the inferior bomb of an
enemy. It does not much matter strategically how much more efficient the
atomic bomb can become provided superiority in efficiency affects chiefly
the fineness of the dust to which it reduces the city upon which it is
dropped.

There are differences between countries in their military vulnerability
to atomic-bomb attack. Since the bomb can have destructive effect which
will justify its own cost only if directed against major targets, a country is
more vulnerable: (a) the greater the proportion of its population which
lives in large cities; (b) the greater the average size and density of these
cities; (c) the greater the urbanization or other regional concentration
of its major industries of military significance; (d) the smaller its total
and per capita resources of capacity for production (and stockpiling);
therefore, other things equal, the smaller the margin of expendable
resources which needs to be consumed before the military and civilian
economies are brought to their physical or psychological breaking points.

There seems to be universal agreement that under atomic-bomb war-
fare there would be a new and tremendous advantage in being first to

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 753

attack and that the atomic bomb therefore gives a greater advantage than
ever to the aggressor. I nevertheless remain unconvinced. No country
possessing atomic bombs will be foolish enough to concentrate either its
bomb-production and bomb-throwing facilities or its bomb-stockpiles at
a small number of spots vulnerable to atomic bomb or other modes of
attack. Let us suppose that a country has been subjected to a surprise
attack by atomic bombs, and that all its large cities have been wiped
out. If it has made the obvious preparations for such an eventuality, why
can it not nevertheless retaliate within a few hours with as effective an
atomic-bomb counter attack as if it had made the first move? What
difference will it then make whether it was country A which had its
cities destroyed at 9 A.M. and country B which had its cities destroyed at
12 A.M., or the other way round? It may be objected that the country
first to attack can evacuate its cities beforehand so that when the counter
attack comes it will lose only its cities, but not their inhabitants. But
mass evacuation of a great city is a process which is both time-consuming
and impossible to conceal. Such evacuation would to any country feeling
itself at all in danger be an advance signal that an attack was in the
offing. It may be argued that the existence of atomic bombs would make
a surprise attack by paratroopers directed at the production facilities
for atomic bombs and at the stockpiles good strategy, and that therefore,
while there may be no particular advantage in a surprise attack with
atomic bombs, there will be a great inducement for a surprise attack with
other weapons on atomic-bomb facilities and stockpiles. But these facilities
and stockpiles can readily be maintained at relatively inaccessible loca-
tions and can be strongly guarded.

There seems to be no prospect of an effective specific defense against
the atomic bombs. In theory, their military effectiveness can be somewhat
reduced, however, by planned decentralization of industry and deurbaniza-
tion of population. Carried on on only a modest scale, this would have
negligible military significance unless it was directed primarily at setting
up a miniature war-economy and military organization, insulated from
the economy as a whole and always ready to act on short notice in
pursuit of military objectives even when the economy as a whole was
engulfed in a disaster situation; carried on on a grand scale, it would be
painfully expensive. There would always be the risk, moreover, that before
mass-decentralization had been carried far, some new development of
lethal weapons would have made it waste effort. In any case, I leave it
to you to judge whether the decentralization of New York, Philadelphia,
Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, can be regarded as physically, economi-
cally, politically, practicable. But our military planners, in deciding upon

754 ATOMIC FISSION

the location of new facilities of military significance, should of course
give careful consideration to the bearing of the atomic bomb upon the
logic of strategic location. This logic calls for as wide a dispersal of
facilities, as complete an avoidance of metropolitan areas as possible and
as little dependence as possible on military communications and trans-
portation, military stockpiles, and military staff personnel on urban-
centered facilities.

The atomic bomb does not, per se, render armies, navies, airfleet,
artillery, and TNT obsolete. But speculation on the nature of military
strategy in an atomic-bomb world, if at this stage it can be sensibly
pursued at all, must proceed from alternative hypotheses as to the stage
in war at which atomic bombs would be used.

Let us first assume that the atomic-bomb phase would come early in
a war. Each side having laid waste the other's cities, the hostilities would
continue with weapons of less lethal power until a decision or a stale-
mate was reached. The major changes that the discovery of the atomic
bomb would then seem to call for in the technical character of future
warfare would be: first, that atomic bombs would supersede other
weapons for attack on large cities and their inhabitants, and, second,
that the drain of economic and manpower resources caused by the destruc-
tion, disorganization, and demoralization brought about by the enemy's
use of the atomic bombs would force a drastically reduced scale of use
of other weapons. It seems to me, indeed, that a war which opened
with atomic-bomb attacks on both sides could then proceed only on a
supply-from-stockpiles basis for a limited period and thereafter only on
a token warfare scale, with defense in both stages at an advantage and
large-scale offense, for logistic reasons, next to impossible.

A much more plausible hypothesis is that in a war between two
fairly-equally-matched states possessed of atomic bombs each side would
refrain from using the bombs at the start; each side would decide that
it had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose from reciprocal use of
the bombs, and that unilateral use was not attainable. The bombs would
then either never be used or would be used only when one of the countries,
in the face of imminent defeat, falls back upon their use in a last desperate
effort to escape a dictated peace. In such a war, the first stages at least
would be fought with all the standard apparatus of war.

A third hypothesis is deserving of consideration. The universal recogni-
tion that if war does break out there can be no assurance that the atomic
bombs will not be resorted to may make statesmen and people determined
to avoid war even where in the absence of the atomic bomb they would

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 755

regard it as the only possible procedure under the circumstances for
resolving a dispute or a clash of interests.

The atomic bomb does not change the ancient rule that victory in war
will gQ to the strong. The atomic bomb does, however, create a new
pattern of distribution of military power in one sense. More accurately, it
restores an ancient pattern which was destroyed by the development in
the nineteenth century of massive weapons of war and of great
mobility of armies and navies, and by the development in the twentieth
century of the airplane. The small country will again not be a cipher
or a mere pawn in power-politics, provided it is big enough to produce
atomic bombs. The small country will still not have prospects of success-
ful defense against an aggressor great country, but even the strongest
country will no longer have any reasonable prospects of a costless victory
over even the smallest country with a stock of atomic bombs. Even com-
plete victory over a small country will involve the probable loss on the
part of the victor of its major cities and their population. Such rela-
tively costless victories as those of Prussia over Denmark, Austria, France
in the nineteenth century, and of Nazi Germany over Poland, France,
Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark in World War II, will no
longer be possible — or at least safe for an aggressive-minded country
to count upon.

The atomic bomb makes war a prospect horrible to contemplate. More-
over, even without the atomic bomb other new military weapons of
unprecedented capacity to destroy life and property already perfected or
soon to be perfected threaten us with horrors not much less awesome than
those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every person of sane mind and sound
morals is anxious that mankind be protected against these horrors by
whatever political means are available. The physical scientists, presumably
because they are better aware than we laymen are of the death-dealing
potentialities of these new weapons, and because they have had more time
to consider what dread fate is in store for us if these potentialities should
ever become actualities, have been particularly active in calling for action,
and rightly so. I gather, however, that they, like many others, think there
must be an effective remedy, that such a remedy is in fact known and
available, and that it consists in the establishment of "World Govern-
ment." I gather also that many of them think that all that stands in the
way of adoption of this remedy is the stupidity of politicians and ordinary
citizens, or their failure to understand how terrible the atomic bomb is
or how impossible it is for any country to retain a monopoly of it.
I fear that the problem is not so simple; that complacency and ignorance
are not the only barriers to World Government.

756 ATOMIC FISSION

Norman Cousins, in an editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature
of August 1 8, 1945, which has received wide distribution, gives us the
following advice:

There is no need to discuss the historical reasons pointing to and arguing
for world government. There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of
world government. There is need only to ask whether we can afford to do
without it. All other considerations become either secondary or inconsequential.

I do not think we can afford to take this advice to disregard whatever
experience has to teach us, to substitute hysteria for history. We are told
that when some danger menaces the ostrich he buries his head in the
sand. Here we are advised to meet the menace of the atomic bomb by
hiding our heads in the clouds. Neither appeals to me as wise procedure.

In theory the world can be effectively organized for peace through uni-
versal pacifism, through universal monarchy, or through world govern-
ment, world government in this connection meaning a world state which
in military matters at least can give the law to national governments or
peoples. We do not know how to get universal pacifism. We do not want
universal monarchy, or the rule of the world by a single nation-state;
even if we did want it — presumably, for ourselves — we probably would
not be willing to pay the price at which it would be obtainable, if at all.
I think world government has been possible in the fairly recent past, and
rnay again be in the somewhat distant future, if as a result of the wide
distribution of atom bombs, or of other conceivable developments, military
power is once more widely distributed. But I do not believe it is possible
now or even that it is possible now definitely to begin planning it for
the future.

The successful establishment of the United States of America out of
separate colonies is often cited in support of the practicability of a United
States of the World. The American precedent has little bearing on the
present problem as long as the United States and Soviet Russia have a
near monopoly between them of military power. Let us suppose that the
New York and the Pennsylvania of 1789 were of approximately equal
importance, that one of them at least were at some distance from the
center of government, and that between them they had, say, 80 or 90
per cent of the total military resources of the Union. Under these cir-
cumstances, neither of them could have been relied upon, at times of
crisis and of strong emotions of fear or anger, to have accepted without
resistance a ruling from the central government which seemed to it to
threaten its vital interests, nor could the ability of the central government
to overcome that resistance by force or otherwise have been relied upon.
That is substantially the situation we are in now. The United States

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 757

and Soviet Russia are each too strong, relative to the total power potential
of the world, to be proper members of a world government, even if
their governments and their peoples were genuinely willing to enter such
a government. In a narrow legal sense sovereignty can easily be formally
surrendered, but actual power is more difficult to surrender and can be
effectively surrendered only to an agency still more powerful. In the
present state of the world such an agency with superior power not only
does not exist but cannot be manufactured out of existing ingredients, even
if the genuine will to do so existed, unless that will goes to the extent of
preparedness on the part of the United States and of Sotnet Russia to
dismember themselves. Splitting the United States and splitting Soviet
Russia seem to present a more difficult problem than splitting the atom
proved to be. Setting up a facade of world government where the power
basis for its successful functioning was not present would be worse than
useless. No government would be fooled thereby into a false sense of
security, but every government would be impelled to pretend that it was,
and all diplomacy would be carried out in an atmosphere of superficially-
concealed insincerity.

I am forced to the conclusion that the only conceivable ways in which
the world even in theory could be effectively organized so as to assure
peace are not available now. We may regret this or we may rejoice in it.
I for one deeply regret it. But our regret or our joy are equally irrelevant.
That does not mean, however, that there is nothing that can be and should
be done to make war less probable. On the contrary. Let us consider the
possibilities of action in this direction.

The balance-of-power system is discredited today. References to it, even
by professional historians and international lawyers, commonly imply
either that it was a system for preventing war which repeatedly failed
or that it was a system for making war which often succeeded in its
purpose. The balance-of-power system had, in fact, neither peace nor
war as its primary objective. Its primary objective was the maintenance
of the independence of the states in the system by associating states in
alliances too strong to be overwhelmed by any single state or combina-
tion of states outside such alliance. The principle of the balance-of-power
called for defensive wars and even for preventive wars to stop any power
from growing so strong that it could upset the balance. The system often
was abused. During the period of its dominance as a European system, say,
1648 to 1918, ;ts record in preventing war was certainly not striking.
Indeed, it probably was itself responsible for starting more wars than
it prevented. As human institutions go, however, it did have extraordinary
success in attaining its primary objective, that of maintaining national

758 ATOMIC FISSION

independence. To the best of my knowledge, only one major European
state, Poland, and only a few minor German states permanently lost
their independence through external aggression in the entire period (1648
to 1918), and in even these instances the failure of England to play its
customary and, I am willing to avow, its useful role in the balance-of-
power system was probably a significant contributory factor. The balance-
of-power system also deserves some of the credit for the receptiveness
of belligerents during that period, including definitely aggressor nations,
to limited warfare when actual hostilities were under way, to early termi-
nation of hostilities, and to moderate peace terms.

Whether we like or detest its record, however, the balance-of-power
system is probably now only of historical interest. In the first place, the
same factors which have created new barriers to world government have
probably destroyed the availability of the balance-of-power system. To
have any chance of effective operation in maintaining international equilib-
rium the system requires that military power be fairly widely distributed
so that there are no overwhelmingly strong concentrations of power, even
regional ones, in single states, and so that there is always some hope, or
fear, that timely negotiations of new alliances will restore a balance tempo-
rarily destroyed. Abstracting from the atomic bomb, the world was emerg-
ing from World War II as a two-power world, with Britain deprived of the
necessary economic base for sustained military effort, with Germany,
Japan, and Italy reduced to military ciphers, and with France's under-
lying weakness finally exposed to view.

The development of the atomic bomb promises to restore some military
significance to the weaker countries; it gives a strong weapon to any coun-
try able to use it. It thus tends to make all countries strong, or to make all
countries weak, as you prefer. It seems doubtful, however, whether it
goes, or will go, far enough in that direction, whether it will scatter mili-
tary power widely enough to make it possible to create a single world
agency strong enough to exact obedience from any single country. Should
it do so, however, then not only an effective balance-of-power system but
even world government will again be possible, and to the discovery of
the atomic bomb will belong the credit. On the other hand, the atomic
bomb removes the physical and administrative restrictions on warfare
which helped to make "limited-warfare" attractive even to aggressors and
therefore tends to deprive the balance-of-power system of its only merit
with respect to the issue of peace or war, namely, that it reduces the
damage done by war when war does occur.

This leaves a Concert or League of Great Powers, committed by solemn
covenant to the maintenance of peace, as the only immediately available

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 759

type of political institution for preserving peace. The League of Nations,
as it actually operated, was, I believe, essentially a Concert of Great
Powers. The United Nations Charter, with its single-veto privilege for
the Great Powers, provides more frankly and honestly for such a Con-
cert. The essence of Concerts and Powers is that they aim to include all
the major powers; that they start with good intentions; that they have the
means and have agreed or can agree upon the procedures by which to
enforce peace upon the small and weak countries; but that they have
neither the means nor the serious intention to enforce peace upon each
other. They should not be despised as useless or evil. Earlier Concerts of
Powers did serve to maintain peace for a time. The League of Nations
never had adequate membership and never was given a fair chance. The
United Nations Organization will start with at least two advantages over
the League of Nations: essentially complete membership and an ambitious
program of beneficent economic and social activities which may succeed
in fostering a feeling of community between the governments and the
peoples of the world strong enough to withstand the strains of the clashes
of interest and of emotions which will inevitably arise. But Concerts of
Powers are essentially self-denying ordinances, embodiments of good
resolutions terminable at will and unilaterally. They cannot have within
themselves effective means for enforcing their own survival. They may
promote peace; they cannot assure it. As an English poet, Blackmore,
said in 1700 of an older Concert of Powers:

To Leagues of Peace the neighbours did agree
And to maintain them, God was guarantee. . . .

There is one more thing, in my opinion by far the most important, that
can be done although it is unfortunately not in the least spectacular, revo-
lutionary, soul-stirring, or exciting. That is the conscientious and unrelent-
ing practice by the statesmen of the Great Powers, day after day, year
after year, of mutually conciliatory diplomacy. Wilful disturbers of the
peace do arise from time to time: Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Napo-
leon, Bismarck, Hitler. But for the most part wars arise out of mutual
fear of peace, out of fear of loss of national independence or of other
nationally treasured objectives unless war is resorted to, more than out
of love of war or than out of lust for war booty. Countries most often
go to war because they fear the consequences of remaining at peace. If
rulers act as statesmen, and if their peoples permit — and still better, de-
mand— that they so act, if rulers so behave as not to arouse or sustain
fear in other countries, lasting peace will still not be guaranteed, but it will
be probable. By making the peace a mutually more satisfactory one, we

760 ATOMIC FISSION

will further lessen the risk that some day some country may fear continu-
ance of the peace more than it fears war. By adding to the horror of war
and therefore to the attractiveness of peace, the discovery of the atomic
bomb will aid instead of hinder the diplomacy of peace. In any case, it is
on the quality of postwar diplomacy and of postwar diplomats, and on
the texts of charters only as they are incidental to, facilitate, and are sup-
ported by the exercise of good diplomacy, that we must rest our main
hopes for the maintenance of peace.

It would be wonderful if it were possible to enforce peace. It would be
wonderful if a workable scheme could be devised whereby the atomic
bomb itself could either be used as the equivalent for the world of the
policeman's baton or could make the baton unnecessary. For the reasons
given, however, I believe that this is under existing circumstances not
within the realm of the possible and that at the best it can be regarded only
as a distant goal. And if it is not, or even probably not, possible in the
near future, I believe it is unwise to pretend that it is possible and thus to
divert attention from those things that are possible and that are possible
now: full support of the United Nations Organization so that it may
realize its fullest potentialities for promoting mutual trust and collaboration
in good causes; public insistence that diplomats gather with the determina-
tion to reach agreement on vital issues rather than with irresponsible
readiness to quarrel on secondary issues. In both cases, this means a call
to action, immediately, and right here in our own country as well as
elsewhere.

*945

Atomic Weapons

J. R. OPPENHEIMER

WHAT YOU HAVE GOOD REASON TO WISH TO HEAR
from me today, what circumstances have perhaps qualified me to
discuss with you on the basis of experience, is how to make atomic
weapons. It is true, as we have so often and so earnestly said, that in the

ATOMIC WEAPONS 761

scientific studies which we had to carry out at Los Alamos, in the practi-
cal arts there developed, there was little of fundamental discovery, there
was no great insight into the nature of the physical world. But we had
many surprises; we learned a good many things about atomic nuclei and
many more about the behavior of matter under extreme and unfamiliar
conditions; and not too few of the undertakings were in their quality and
style worthy of the best traditions of physical science. It would not be a
dull story; it is being recorded in a handbook of fifteen volumes, much
of which we think will be of interest to scientists even if they are not by
profession makers of atomic bombs. It would be a pleasure to tell you a
little about it. It would be a pleasure to help you to share our pride in the
adequacy and the soundness of the physical science, of our common
heritage, that went into this weapon, that proved itself last summer in the
New Mexico desert.

That would not be a dull story; but it is not one that I can tell today.
It would be too dangerous to tell that story. That is what the President,,
on behalf of the people of the United States, has told us. That is what many
of us, were we forced ourselves to make the decision, might well conclude.
What has come upon us, that the insight, the knowledge, the power of
physical science, to the cultivation of which, to the learning and teaching
of which we are dedicated, has become too dangerous to be talked of even
in these halls? It is that question that faces us now, that goes to the root
of what science is and what its value is; it is to that question to which
tentatively, partially, and with a profound sense of its difficulty and my
own inadequacy, I must try to speak today.

It is not a familiar question to us in these late days. It is not a familiar
situation. If it seems to bear analogy to that raised by other weapons, to
the need for a certain secrecy, let us say, in the discussion of howitzers,
or torpedoes, that analogy will mislead us. There are some accidents in
this situation, some things that may in the large light of history seem
contingent. Atomic weapons are based on things that are in the very
frontier of physics; their development is inextricably entangled with the
growth of physics, as in all probability with that of the biological sciences,
and many practical arts. Atomic weapons were actually made by scientists,
even, some of you may think, by scientists normally committed to the ex-
ploration of rather recondite things. The speed of the development, the
active and essential participation of men of science in the development,
have no doubt contributed greatly to our awareness of the crisis that
faces us, even to our sense of responsibility for its resolution. But these
are contingent things. What is not contingent is that we have made a thing,
a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the

762 ATOMIC FISSION

nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all the standards of
the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And so by doing, by our partici-
pation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again
the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to
learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help
give to the world of men increased insight, increased power. Because we
are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes to these questions: it is our
faith and our commitment, seldom made explicit, even more seldom
challenged, that knowledge is a good in itself, knowledge and such powet
as must come with it.

One will perhaps think back to the early days of physical science in
western culture when it was felt as so deep a threat to the whole Christian
world. One will remember the more recent times of the last century where
such a threat was seen by some in the new understanding of the relations
between man and the rest of the living world. One may even remember
the concern among the learned at some of the developments of physics,
the theory of relativity, even more the ideas of complentarity, and their
far-reaching implications on the relations of common sense and of
scientific discovery, their enforced reminder, familiar to Hindu culture
but rather foreign to that of Europe, of the latent inadequacies of human
conceptions to the real world they must describe. One may think of these
things, and especially of the great conflicts of the Renaissance, because
they reflect the truth that science is a part of the world of men; that often
before it has injected into that world elements of instability and change;
that if there is peril in the situation today, as I believe, we may look to the
past for reassurance that our faith in the value of knowledge can prevail.

An atomic bomb is not a new conception, a new discovery of reality:
it is a very ordinary thing in some ways, compact with much of the science
that makes our laboratories and our industry. But it will change men's
lives as over the centuries the knowledge of the solar system changed
them; for in a world of atomic weapons wars will cease. And that is not
a small thing, not small in itself, as the world knows today perhaps more
bitterly than ever before, but perhaps in the end even greater in the
alterations, the radical if slow alterations, in the relations between men and
between nations and cultures, that it implies.

It can only help us, I believe, to recognize these issues as rather great
issues. We can serve neither ourselves, nor the cause of the freedom and
growth of science, nor our fellow men, if we underestimate the difficulties,
or if we through cowardice becloud the radical character of the conflict and
its issue. During our lifetime perhaps atomic weapons could be either a

ATOMIC WEAPONS 763

great or a small trouble. They cannot be a small hope. They can be a great
one.

Sometimes, when men speak of the great hope and the great promise
of the field of atomic energy, they speak, not of peace, but of atomic power
and of nuclear radiations. Certainly these are proper enthusiasms, en-
thusiasms that we must all share. The technical feasibility of deriving
virtually unlimited amounts of power from controlled nuclear reactors
seems nearly certain, and realization of plants to demonstrate the ad-
vantages and limitations of such power does not seem, from the point of
view of technical effort, remote. One must look at history to learn that
such possibilities will in time be found of value, will in time come to play
an important, even if at this moment not thoroughly understood, part in
our industry and economy. You have heard of some of the biological
and medical problems and uses of radiation from such reactors. Even
physicists can think of some instructive things to do with the grams of
neutrons such reactors make available. And all of us, who have seen some-
thing of the growth of science, know very well that what we can dis-
cern of the possibilities in these fields is a very small part of what will
turn up when we get into them.

Nevertheless, it would seem somewhat wrong to me to let our confidence
— in my view our wholly justified confidence — in the future of the peace-
ful applications of nuclear physics distract us entirely from the immediacy,
and the peril, of atomic weapons. It would not be honest to do so, for not
even a better understanding of the physical world, not even the most
welcome developments of therapy, should make us content to sec these
weapons turned to the devastation of the earth. It will not even be very
practical to do so. Technically, the operation of reactors and the manu-
facture of weapons are rather closely related. Wherever reactors are in
operation there is a potential source, not necessarily a convenient one, of
materials for weapons; wherever materials are made for weapons they
can be used for reactors that may be well suited to research or power de-
velopment. And it would seem to me almost inevitable that in a world
committed to atomic armament the shadows of fear, secrecy, constraint,
and guilt would hang heavily over much of nuclear physics, much of
science. Scientists in this country have been quick to sense this and to
attempt to escape it. I do not think that this attempt can be very successful
in a world of atomic armament.

There is another set of arguments whose intent is to minimize the
impact of atomic weapons, and thus to delay or to avert the inevitably,
in the end, radical changes in the world which their advent would seem to
require. There are people who say they are not such very bad weapons.

764 ATOMIC FISSION

Before the New Mexico test we sometimes said that too, writing down
square miles and equivalent tonnages and looking at the pictures of a
ravaged Europe. After the test we did not say it any more. Some of you
will have seen photographs of the Nagasaki strike, seen the great steel
girders of factories twisted and wrecked; some of you may have noticed
that these factories that were wrecked were miles apart. Some of you will
have seen pictures of the people who were burned, or had a look at the
wastes of Hiroshima. That bomb at Nagasaki would have taken out ten
square miles, or a bit more, if there had been ten square miles to take
out. Because it is known that the project cost us two billion dollars, and
we dropped just two bombs, it is easy to think that they must be very
expensive. But for any serious undertaking in atomic armament — and
without any elements of technical novelty whatever, just doing things
that have already been done — that estimate of cost would be high by
something like a factor of a thousand. Atomic weapons, even with what we
know today, can be cheap. Even with what we know how to do today,
without any of the new things, the little things and the radical things,
atomic armament will not break the economic back of any people that
want it.

The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima. They
are weapons of aggression, of surprise, and of terror. If they are ever
used again it may well be by the thousands, or perhaps by tens of
thousands; their method of delivery may well be different and may reflect
new possibilities of interception, and the strategy of their use may well
be different from what it was against an essentially defeated enemy. But
it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror
are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.

One of our colleagues, a man most deeply committed to the welfare
and growth of science, advised me not long ago not to give too much
weight in any public words to the terrors of atomic weapons as they are
and as they can be. He knows as well as any of us how much more terrible
they can be made. "It might cause a reaction," he said, "hostile to science.
It might turn people away from science." He is not such an old man, and
I think it will make little difference to him, or to any of us, what is said
now about atomic weapons if before we die we live to see a war in which
they are used. I think that it will not help to avert such a war if we try to
rub the edges off this new terror that we have helped bring to the world.
I think that it is for us among all men, for us as scientists perhaps in
greater measure because it is our tradition to recognize and to accept the
strange and the new, I think it is for us to accept as fact this new terror,
and to accept with it the necessity for those transformations in the world

ATOMIC WEAPONS 765

which will make it possible to integrate these developments into human
life. I think we cannot in the long term protect science against this threat
to its spirit and this reproach to its issue unless we recognize the threat
and the reproach and help our fellow men in every way suitable to remove
their cause. Their cause is war.

If I return so insistently to the magnitude of the peril, not only to science,
but to our civilization, it is because I see in that our one great hope. As a
further argument against war, like arguments that have always existed,
that have grown with the gradual growth of modern technology, it is
not unique; as a further matter requiring international consideration,
like all other matters that so require it, it is not unique. But as a vast
threat, and a new one, to all the peoples of the earth, by its novelty, its
terror, its strangely promethean quality, it has become, in the eyes of many
of us, an opportunity unique and challenging.

It has proven most difficult to make those changes in the relations be-
tween nations and peoples, those concurrent and mutually dependent
changes in law, in spirit, in customs, in conceptions — and they are all
essential and no one of them is absolutely prior to the others — that should
make an end to war. It has not only been difficult; it has been impossible.
It will be difficult in the days ahead, difficult and beset with discourage-
ments and frustrations, and it will be slow. But it will not be impossible.
If it is recognized, as I think it should be recognized, that this, for us, in
our time, is the fundamental problem of human society, that it is a pre-
condition not only for civilized life, or for freedom, but for the attainment
of any living human aspiration, then it will not be impossible. These are
very major commitments, nor would I minimize their depth. For they in-
volve holding prior to all else we cherish — all that we would live for
and die for — our common bond with all peoples everywhere, our common
responsibility for a world without war, our common confidence that in
a world thus united the things that we cherish — learning and freedom
and humanity — will not be lost.

These words may seem visionary, but they are not meant so. It is a
practical thing to avert an atomic war. It is a practical thing to recognize
the fraternity of the peoples of the world. It is a practical thing to recognize
as a common responsibility, wholly incapable of unilateral solution, the
completely common peril that atomic weapons constitute for the world,
to recognize that only by a community of responsibility is there any hope
of meeting the peril. It could be an eminently practical thing to attempt
to develop these arrangements and that spirit of confidence between
peoples that are needed for the control of atomic weapons. It could be
practical to regard this as a pilot plant for all those other necessary inter-

766 ATOMIC FISSION

national arrangements without which there will be no peace. For this is
a new field, less fettered than most with vested interest or with the vast
inertia of centuries of purely national sovereignty; this is a new field,
growing out of a science inspired by the highest ideals of international
fraternity.

It would seem somewhat visionary and more than a little dangerous
to hope that work on atomic energy and atomic weapons might proceed
as have so many things in the past, like the building of battleships, on a
purely and narrowly national authority, without basic confidence between
peoples, without cooperation or the abrogation in any way of sovereignty,
and to hope that with such a course an armament race would not develop,
that somehow these separate, distrustful atomic arsenals would make for
the peace of the world. It would seem to me visionary in the extreme, and
not practical, to hope that methods which have so sadly failed to avert
war in the past will succeed in the face of this far graver peril.

It would in my opinion be most dangerous to regard, in these shattering
times, a radical solution as less practical than a conventional one. It
would also be most dangerous, and most certain to lead to tragic dis-
couragements, to expect that a radical solution can evolve rapidly, or that
its evolution will be free of the gravest conflicts and uncertainties. The
first steps in implementing the internationalization of responsibility — of
responsibility perhaps in the first instance for averting the perils of an
atomic war — will inevitably be very modest. It is surely not proper for
me, who have neither experience nor knowledge, to speak of what such
steps might be. But there are two things that perhaps might be borne in
mind that we might wish to say as scientists. One is that, not only politi-
cally but technically, this field of atomic energy is a very new field and
a very rapidly changing one, and that it would be well to stress the interim,
tentative character of any arrangements that might in the near future
seem appropriate. The second is that in the encouragement and cultivation
of the exchange between nations of scientists and students we would see,
not only an opportunity for strengthening the fraternity between scientists
of different lands, but a valuable aid in establishing confidence among the
nations as to their interests and activities in science generally, and in the
fields bearing on atomic energy in particular. It is not at all as a species
of super-intelligence that we should propose this; it is rather as a concrete
and constructive, if limited, form of those relations of co-operation among
nations which must be the hope of the future. Let me say again: these
remarks are not intended in any way to define or exhaust the content of
any international arrangements it may be possible or appropriate to make
nor to limit them; they are offered as suggestions that occur naturally to

ATOMIC WEAPONS 767

a scientist who would wish to be helpful, but they leave quite untouched
the basic problems of statesmanship on which all else depends.

There will have been little in these words that can have been new to
anyone. For months now there has been among scientists, as well as
many others, a concrete, often a most confusingly articulate concern, both
for the critical situation in which nuclear physics finds itself and for the
more general dangers of atomic war. It seems to me that these reactions
among scientists, that have caused them to meet and speak and testify
and write and wrangle without remission, and that are general almost to
the point of universality, reflect, correctly reflect, an awareness of un-
paralleled crisis. It is a crisis because, not only the preferences and tastes
of scientists are in jeopardy, but the substance of their faith: the general
recognition of the value, the unqualified value, of knowledge, of scientific
power and progress. Whatever the individual motivation and belief of
the scientist, without that recognition from his fellow men of the value
of his work, in the long term science will perish. I do not believe that it
will be possible to transcend the present crisis in a world in which the
works of science are being used, and are being knowingly used, for ends
men hold evil; in such a world it will be of little help to try to protect
the scientist from restraints, from controls, from an imposed secrecy, which
he rightly finds incompatible with all he has learned to believe and cherish.
Therefore, it has seemed necessary to me to explore somewhat the impact
of the advent of atomic weapons on our fellow men, and the courses that
might lie open for averting the disaster that they invite. I think there is
only one such course, and that in it lies the hope of all our futures.

Acknowledgments

For arrangements made with various authors and publishing firms whereby

certain copyrighted material was permitted to be reprinted, and for the

courtesies extended by them, the following acknowledgments are gratefully

made:

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD from Life: Outlines of General Biology by Sir

J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, reprinted by permission from

Harper & Brothers.
WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS from Darwiniana by T. H. Huxley, reprinted by

permission from D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.
SCIENTISTS ARE LONELY MEN by Oliver La Farge, reprinted by permission

from Harpers Magazine and from Oliver La Farge.
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ by Dallas Lore Sharp, reprinted by permission from

The Atlantic Monthly.
ADDRESS BEFORE STUDENT BODY, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY by

Albert Einstein, reprinted by permission from Albert Einstein and from the

Sigma Xi Quarterly.
ICARUS IN SCIENCE from Stars and Atoms by Sir Arthur Eddington, reprinted

by permission from Yale University Press.
THE SEARCH FOR UNITY by Raymond B. Fosdick, from The Rockefeller

Foundation Review for 1941, reprinted by permission from Raymond B.

Fosdick.
THE ORDERLY UNIVERSE by Forest Ray Moulton, from The World and Man:

As Science Sees Them, edited by Forest Ray Moulton, copyright, 1937, re-
printed by permission from Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
Is THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? by Sir James Jeans, an afternoon lecture

of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, reprinted by permission from Sir

James Jeans.
THE MILKY WAY AND BEYOND reprinted by permission from Sir Arthur

Eddington.
GEOLOGICAL CHANGE by Sir Archibald Geike, Presidential Address before

British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1892, reprinted by per-
mission from the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The

original article carried no tide.
EARTHQUAKES — WHAT ARE THEY? by the Reverend James B. Macelwane,

S. J., reprinted by permission from The Scientific Monhtly and from Father

Macelwane.
LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE from Disaster Fighters by Fairfax Downey, reprinted

by courtesy of G. P. Putnam's Sons.

769

770 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MAN, MAKER OF WILDERNESS from Deserts on the March by Paul B. Sears,
reprinted by permission from the University of Oklahoma Press.

WHAT MAKES THE WEATHER by Wolfgang Langewiesche, reprinted by per-
mission from Harpers Magazine.

MATHEMATICS, THE MIRROR OF CIVILIZATION from Mathematics for the Million
by Lancelot Hogben, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and
reprinted by their permission.

EXPERIMENTS AND IDEAS by Benjamin Franklin, from The Ingenious Dr.
Franklin edited by Nathan Goodman, reprinted by permission from The
University of Pennsylvania Press.

EXPLORING THE ATOM from The Universe Around Us by Sir James Jeans,
reprinted by permission from The Macmillan Company, publishers.

TOURING THE ATOMIC WORLD by Henry Schacht, reprinted by permission from
The California Monthly.

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIUM from Madame Curie: A Biography, by Eve Curie,
copyright, 1937, by Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., reprinted by
permission from Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc.

THE TAMING OF ENERGY from Atoms in Action by George Russell Harrison,
copyright 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941 by George Russell Harrison, reprinted by
permission from William Morrow & Co., Inc.

SPACE, TIME AND EINSTEIN by Paul R. Heyl, reprinted by permission from
The Scientific Monthly and from Paul R. Heyl.

FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY by Robert E. Rose, from Chemistry in
Industry edited by H. E. Howe, reprinted by permission from The Chemical
Foundation and from Robert E. Rose.

THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION from Science Today and Tomorrow, copyright
1939 by Waldemar Kaempffert, reprinted by permission from The Viking
Press, Inc., New York.

JETS POWER FUTURE FLYING by Watson Davis from Science News Letter and
the author. Copyright 1947 by Science Service, Inc.

SCIENCE IN WAR AND AFTER from Atoms in Action by George Russell Har-
rison, copyright 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941 by George Russell Harrison, re-
printed by permission from William Morrow & Co., Inc.

THE NATURE OF LIFE from The Nature of Life by W. J. V. Osterhout, re-
printed by permission from Brown University and from W. J. V. Osterhout.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS from Life: Outlines of General Biology
by Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, reprinted by permission from
Harper & Brothers.

LEEUWENHOEK: FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS, condensed, from Microbe
Hunters, copyright, 1926, by Paul de Kruif, reprinted by permission from
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

WHERE LIFE BEGINS from The Advancing Front of Science by George W.
Gray, reprinted by permission from McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

ON BEING THE RIGHT SIZE from Possible Worlds by J. B. S. Haldane, reprinted
by permission from Harper & Brothers.

PARASITISM AND DEGENERATION from Evolution and Animal Life by David
Starr Jordan and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, reprinted by permission from
D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.

FLOWERING EARTH from Flowering Earth by Donald Culross Peattie, re-
printed by courtesy of G. P. Putnam's Sons.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 77 1

A LOBSTER; OR, THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY from Discourses Biological and Geo-
logical, by T. H. Huxley, reprinted by permission from D. Appleton-Century
Company, Inc.

THE LIFE OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS from Animal Life by David Starr Jordan
and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, reprinted by permission from D. Appleton-
Century Company, Inc.

SECRETS OF THE OCEAN from The Log of the Sun by William Beebe, reprinted
by permission from Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

THE WARRIOR ANTS from Of Ants and Men by Caryl P. Haskins, reprinted by
permission from Prentice-Hall, Inc., 70 Fifth Avenue, New York.

THE VAMPIRE BAT by Raymond L. Ditmars and Arthur M. Greenhall, re-
printed in condensed form from Zoologica, Scientific Contributions of the
New Yor% Zoological Society, by permission from the New York Zoological
Society.

ANCESTORS by Gustav Eckstein, reprinted by permission from Harpers Maga-
zine and from Gustav Eckstein.

DARWIN AND "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" by Sir Arthur Keith, an Introduction
to the Everyman's Library edition of The Origin of Species by Charles
Darwin, reprinted by permission from E. P. Dutton and Company.

GREGOR MENDEL AND His WORK by Hugo Iltis, reprinted by permission from
The Scientific Monthly and from Hugo Iltis.

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS from Man Stands Alone by Julian Huxley, re-
printed by permission from Harper & Brothers.

MAGIC ACRES by Alfred Toombs, reprinted by permission from The American
Magazine and Alfred Toombs.

THE UPSTART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM by Earnest A. Hooton, reprinted by
permission from The American Scholar.

MISSING LINKS by John R. Baker, from Science in a Changing World edited
by Mary Adams, reprinted by permission from George Allen and Unwin,
Ltd., and from D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.

LESSONS IN LIVING FROM THE STONE AGE by Vilhjalmur Stefanssori, reprinted
by permission from Harpers Magazine.

RACIAL CHARACTERS OF THE BODY from Man: A History of the Human Body
by Sir Arthur Keith, reprinted by permission from the Oxford University
Press.

You AND HEREDITY from You and Heredity by Amram Scheinfeld, reprinted
by permission from Frederick A. Stokes Company, Inc.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE UNBORN, a Reader's Digest condensation of the book
Biography of the Unborn by Margaret Shea Gilbert, reprinted by permission
from The Reader's Digest and from The Williams & Wilkins Company.

How THE HUMAN BODY Is STUDIED from Man: A History of the Human Body
by Sir Arthur Keith, reprinted by permission from the Oxford University
Press.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY DARWIN by Julian Huxley, originally titled "Man
as a Relative Being," from Science in a Changing World edited by Mary
Adams, reprinted by permission from George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., and
from D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.

HIPPOCRATES THE GREEK — THE END OF MAGIC from Behind the Doctor by
Logan Clendening, reprinted by permission of and special arrangement
with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1933 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

772 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Louis PASTEUR AND THE CONQUEST OF RABIES from The Life of Pasteur by
Rene Vallery-Radot, reprinted by permission from Doubleday, Doran &
Company, Inc.

LEPROSY IN THE PHILIPPINES from An American Doctor's Odyssey by Victor
Heiser, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and reprinted by their
permission.

WAR MEDICINE AND WAR SURGERY from Science in War by George W. Gray,
reprinted by permission from Harper & Brothers.

THINKING from The Mind in the Making by James Harvey Robinson, re-
printed by permission from Harper & Brothers.

IMAGINATION CREATRIX from The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes,
reprinted by permission from Houghton Mifflin Company.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIGMUND FREUD by A. A. Brill, an Introduction to The
Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, reprinted by permission from The
Modern Library and A. A. Brill.

BRAIN STORMS AND BRAIN WAVES from The Advancing Front of Medicine by
George W. Gray, reprinted by permission from McGraw-Hill Book Com-
pany, Inc.

ATOMIC ENERGY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES by Henry D. Smyth, reprinted by
permission from the Princeton University Press.

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY by E. O. Lawrence, reprinted by permission
from the Rutgers' University Press.

ALMIGHTY ATOM by John J. O'Neill, reprinted by permission from Ives Wash-
burn, Inc.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE ATOMIC BOMB FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS by
Jacob Viner, reprinted by permission from the American Philosophical So-
ciety and the author.

ATOMIC WEAPONS by J. R. Oppenheimer, reprinted by permission from the
American Philosophical Society and the author.

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